Subject: RE: Domino 6 Archiving questions–HELP NEEDED!
[Your fast response was amazing! Thank you so much for your insight.]
Archiving policies are currently my Hot New Thing ™ so it’s easy for me to
want to stay on top of them.
[-Our Tech team was all amazed that you are allocating 1.4 TB for mail
archives! That is huge. What we were wondering was how many users you had! How
much is allocated per user?]
Depends on how you look at it, really. As many as 18,000, if we end up
archiving the whole domain there. Could be as few as 5,000 (which is still a
lot).
The thing is, why not stack a whole lot of disk? Even high-end SCSI drives,
which you can pop into Sun boxes as readily as NT boxes, only run about $3/GB.
So we’re talking less then $5,000 for all that diskspace. Is that really so
much when administering an enterprise messaging system? Even if you want to
mirror it, you’re talking $9,000 at the high-end. It’s still a line-item in
terms of a multi-million dollar installation, where you might be spending
$300,000 just on client licenses, and $800,000 on consulting services.
And think of the benefits. You never have to tell users that they have a
disk quota. You just archive off for the next three years, at which point
drive space will be 50% of today’s cost. As long as you’re not trying to tape
archive it, I’ve never really understood the resistance to throwing huge
amounts of drive space on a server. When you think of the data as
“production,” then it’s more expensive to administer. But if you think of it
as similar to paper archives, and therefore not mission critical, then you can
ease up a lot on the priority of it.
[-I checked out the admin help on archive policies, and they’re great, as
you said.]
I’m really impressed by this aspect of R6. Kudos to the engineers on it!
[-We would really like to know more about Compact. What exactly does it do
and how does it work? For example, when you run Compact, does it only compress
the file, or does it strip out headers, etc.?]
These days, Compact is a bit of a multi-purpose tool. When it was first
created, it was a process to recover allocated diskspace for an NSF. So if you
had an NSF with 100,000 documents, and you deleted 90,000 of them, then running
Compact would get back the drive allocation on the NSF, reducing the file size.
Later, Compact also became the tool you used to upgrade the On-Disk Structure
of an NSF. So when new versions came out, you’d run Compact, it would
restructure the files on disk, and you’d get the efficiency gains on the new
version.
Now, Compact also include the -A switch, which tells the server to process
archiving rules on the database at the same time. This means that if your
archiving rules say “copy documents older than 90 days to this other database,
then delete them in the source,” Compact will perform that at an API level,
then recover the space in the source NSF. Check out the Admin Help for
“Compact” for more details.
[-You asked what a network server was, and you were right in saying that
we are archiving to a File Services server on our network (NT). From what we
read in the admin help, it shouldn’t matter if it’s server-based or
client-based. What are the pros and cons?]
Well, if you’re having clients write to a network file server, then you have
significant traffic, plus the security of the resulting archive is dependent
on your network-level security. That is, if the CEO archives his mail to the
NT file server, and I come along and access his home directory on that server,
unless you’ve taken careful steps, I’ll be able to access his archive from my
Notes client with full access rights.
[With server-based, we can specify all archive settings at the server, but
is this just for R6, or previous versions (5.0.11) as well? Not sure if you
would know this since you are working with R6.]
As long as the source server and the archive server are both R6 (they can be
the same server if you want), then you’re fine. The database itself doesn’t
have to be an R6 template or anything.
[We really do appreciate the help. Thanks again for all of your
insight!]
No problem. As I said, this is currently an area of strong interest for me.
I mean, do you want