"To give you an idea of just our mail environment, we currently support approx 1600 users. The majority of our users (1530) are located on 2 clustered dedicated mail servers here in Sydney, with approx 70 users on a branch server in Melbourne that provides both Domino and file server functionality. All servers are running on Windows NT with sp6a (with plans to move shortly to Windows 2000). In the past, we have not enforced any quotas on user mail files. I believe that it would cause too many issues for our users (eg, being a clustered mail server environment). As a result, mail files became quite large and the costs of housing this data increased dramatically. We commissioned Webwise Network Consultants back in 1999 to develop an archiving solution for us to help alleviate problems we had with these volumes of data."

Current Situation

"We are still using the archiving solution and it has proved to be well worth the initial investment. As of the last archiving run on the weekend, the process has successfully archived 499 Gb of user data. Of that amount, 224 Gb has been purged. As the majority of this 499 Gb is clustered, the true saving is close to 980 Gb saved in hard drive space - not bad in only 3.5 years (N.B. Savings are also realised in terms of reduced backup costs)."

"Webwise Network Consultants have provided us with great support throughout the life of this product. We re-engaged them on a few occasions to request further functionality. Once investigated, they worked closely with us to successfully implement these new features into the product. eg, the original product was designed to run the archiving process on the same server as the data was located. Although this worked well in the management of database sizes, we didn't realise any space savings until the purge period was reached (as the archive dbs were located on the same disk volume). New functionality allowed us to move the archiving process and archive mail files off the mail servers to a dedicated archiving server. This is where we have seen our best return on investment as the data is now located on a much cheaper storage (ie, standard Compaq hard drives as opposed to EMC)."

"Our archive and purging policy states that mail older than 4 months is automatically archived to a user's archive mail database. Data stays in the archive database for another 8 months until it is purged. As a result, users have a 12 month window before their data has to be requested from tape. Over the last couple of years, we have changed the archive and purge window to find a good fit for our users. Users have the ability to set a "keep until" date on a document in case they feel the need to keep the email for periods longer than 12 months (N.B. this is set on a document by document basis to stop them from selecting all at once). The archiving process is run once a week (kicked off at 06:00 on Saturday) and takes approx 30 hrs to complete. This might sound like a long time, but it is dependent on the type of database being processed. A database takes longer if it contains many user defined folders. Some of our users are extreme with this - I think the company record is 980 folders in a single mail file!! The good thing about having a dedicated archive server is that it doesn't really matter how long it takes as the machine is not required for anything else. On average, the weekly process archives approx 6Gb of data and purges approx 2.5Gb."

Bruce Williams
Senior Lotus Domino Consultant