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GFI MailArchiver – Server Recommendation

Hi,

I am currently trailing GFI MailArchiver and should it be successful I will be looking into what hardware I should purchase. Can anyone out there make a recommendation?

We have 150 mailboxes so I will be certainly using the 4 disk recommended option but I will have to surely implement RAID so that will be more. Then again how large should these disks be? What I mean is, for the processor and the memory that is fine but for the actual sizes I am not sure what to go for, is it 10GB for the first drive or 40GB for the first drive. Is it 20GB for the second drive or 100GB for the second drive and so on and so on...

Would be delighted to hear what the rest of you have or would recommend

Thanks in advance!

Declan D

P.S – Also I would be delighted to hear about your experiences in using this product.

lrpage

Sounds like your OS install and maybe app install on your first drive. Windows 2008 I assume, 50 gb would be a good round number. The second drive is all dependent on what you want to spend and how much data you plan to hold. Email archiving can take some room. 150 users but how much data for how long... do you save attachments etc? What is your email volume per day, per year? In theory you want to archive email data for years to come. (or perhaps 90 days ask legal) Make sure you have enough room for that growth.

Raid 5 at the very least for the drives.

I have not tried that particular product.

deckydee

ASKER

Hi Irpage and thanks for responding

Ok, so I guess that is Raid 5 for all 4 disks.

This was our e-mail volume for February 2011:

Date range : 1/02/2011 to 28/02/2011

Total (IN) Size      Total (IN) Emails      Total (OUT) Size      Total (OUT) Emails
7,17 GBytes      25900        3,55 GBytes        16451

Date range : 1/01/2010 to 31/12/2010

Total (IN) Size      Total (IN) Emails      Total (OUT) Size      Total (OUT) Emails
61,95 GBytes      260392        34,74 GBytes        290734

It is quiet a lot isnt it!

Which makes things quiet confusing! What goes where on what disk.

Its really not clear from GFI

lrpage

Never having used the GFI product

There should be a way to tell it where to store the data/archive

Now you just need to figure out how large to make your archive before you buy your disks.
looks like 100 gb of data per year, time x year plus growth more employees etc nice starting point. Does GFI do some sort of deduplication? That saves a lot of room.

deckydee

ASKER

Hi again Irpage!

Thanks for you assistance and advice!

We have already 332GB of PST files that we have to 'migrate' so that is already something. We have now 150 employees, its impossible that we will go anything higher that 250 in the next 2-3 years (famous last words)

So, if we have 100GB per year mail and 332GB of PST files already, that would make in theory over the next 5 years roughly 1TB of mail archieve. Now hard drives are cheap so purchasing a 2TB hard disk would not break the bank. This would give us 1TB of space to grow should there be more employees in the future.

We could even go for a 3TB hard disk.

Now its a case of finding out what goes on what disks and I am already a step closer...that question of course is for GFOI

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

lrpage

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