Bigger is better, and one place where that axiom holds special significance is with mailbox sizes. Gone are the days of tiny mailboxes and quotas to enforce that. Everything is moving to email and every one of your users needs more space.
If your Exchange Server is connected to a SAN, it’s easy to provision more space as mailbox sizes continue to grow, but if you are running Exchange 2010 with directly attached storage (DAS) you are going to reach the point where there’s just no more space to be added, and as volumes start to reach their limits, you start to see your system log fill with event ID 2013-“disk is at or near capacity. You may need to delete some files.” Exchange archiving is a great way to reduce the size of mailboxes without requiring users to delete content, but it needs another mailbox database for storage. If your Exchange Server is out of space, there’s no place for Exchange archiving to move messages, and buying another Exchange license just for a server to store archives may be excessive, or even out of your budget.
Exchange 2010 made great improvements in performance and its use of disk, and the new vision of large mailboxes combined with cheap storage, seemed like a great way to go for many companies. But as mailboxes grew, it started to take longer and longer to perform database backups, and when necessary, restores. Spreading the largest consumers across multiple databases helped with that, but all that messaging content is still sitting on disks in some Exchange database. As more business processes start to use (or depend upon) an email component, disk consumption continues to climb, and sooner or later, servers begin to throw event 2013s as they run low on space. Once an admin adds as much disk space as the server can handle, they find themselves in a tough spot.
And that’s where email archiving solutions come into play. Giving you the option to supplement or even replace Exchange archiving, email archiving solutions provide another way for users to store and access their older email content, enabling administrators to offload storage from their Exchange Servers. Email archiving solutions work with Exchange, seamlessly plugging in so that users won’t even notice, and enabling admins to easily set up rules to move content from the active Exchange mailbox to the archive storage. Email archives keep the older content online and available to users, but without consuming the costly disk space that Exchange databases prefer, and without a need to purchase another Exchange 2010 license.
So here’s how to solve the 2013’s on your Exchange Server without having to delete a single message or buy another Exchange Server license:
1. Deploy an email archiving solution
2. Integrate it with your existing Exchange infrastructure
3. Migrate older content to the email archive.
You get immediate relief for your Exchange Server, your users don’t lose any content at all, and can start taking rebalancing your existing mailbox databases now that you have breathing room. Email archiving is a great add on, that can take your Exchange archiving to the next level. Check out email archiving softwares today.
This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. Read more on how to improve your Exchange archiving.
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