Exchange 2010 Storage Planning
When moving to Exchange 2010, there are two key questions regarding storage.
How large do you want to make the new mailboxes?
- Exchange 2010 can manage 10 GB mailboxes, as a result of major disk I/O improvements. Mailbox size directly impacts system recovery time, so you may still want to be conservative with mailbox quotas. But it is fine to have mailboxes in the 2-10GB range.
Do you want to use the new archiving mailboxes?
- Exchange 2010 has archive mailboxes. These are second mailboxes that sit in their own Store. They all the same features of a normal mailbox, including quotas, folder retention and deleted items. Archive mailboxes are viewed alongside the primary mailbox in Outlook and OWA. The only drawback of archive mailboxes is that they are not cached locally, so you must be online to view their contents.
- If you plan a dual mailbox strategy, which I recommend, then it really gets exciting. For example, you can keep the primary mailbox capacity capped at 2GB to ensure fast recovery for the primary Stores. For additional email capacity, you can add an archiving mailbox with say 8GB of capacity. Exchange will take care of moving email from the primary mailbox to the secondary mailbox, so in effect the two mailboxes behave as one. Nice!
Bob Spurzem - In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Iron Mountain Digital Division, which was recently purchased by Autonomy.