Ladies and Gentlemen,
Our EV 7.5 SP3 environment needs an upgrade. Inevitably, the budget is very tight and I’ve been given strict instructions that I cannot exceed the allowance.
Our Exchange 2007 environment consists of two CCR clusters and targets, for EV, a single server running EV 2007 7.5 SP3. There are approx 13,000 mailboxes, in place. The majority are user mailboxes, with shared mailboxes and a proportion of ‘former employee’ mailboxes.
Our user base includes Citrix and VPN users, as well as OWA users and of course office based LAN users.
Average mail item size is 100Kb.
Our archive strategy is aggressive: all mail older than 28 days is archived via EV.
Our current EV Server has about 13Tb of mail data stored already, and the ‘a5’ private queues are already rather huge: around 655000 for each of our two exchange server clusters.
In the last couple of years, we’ve already added an extra 10Tb of archive space and doubled the size of the Indexing drive.
In an ideal world, we’d probably have one EV server per Exchange CCR cluster, but the funds available will not stretch to that luxury.
I’ve been offered an HP DL/580 G5 with 4 x Quad core processors, 32Gb of RAM and 15Tb of SAN storage – this is expected to last us three years The latter is to be split between Fast SCSI for Indexing and Fibre ETA for Archive storage. We’ll be relocating the existing direct attached arrays to the new server. It’s our intention to upgrade to the latest version of EV (10.0.2 ?) and realise that to do so, we’ll have to upgrade through EV 8.x and EV 9.x. before we can get to version 10.
I’d appreciate any suggestions for alternative configurations of hardware that keep us within budget and give an improved throughput of archived data.