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Storage Tier per domain for bigger quotas
Idea shared by Sérgio Rocha - 11/18/2024 at 9:15 AM
Under Consideration
Hi Everyone,


In my opinion, it's time for SM to consider things from a System Administrator's perspective.

One of the biggest challenges today (aside from JSON corruption) is effective storage management. For optimal performance/value, SM should ideally operate on NVMe storage. However, the high cost of NVMe makes it impractical to store the massive volumes of data required today entirely on this medium.

I believe it wouldn’t be too complex for SM to implement a system with two storage tiers per domain. This would allow older GRP data to be moved from NVMe storage to a more cost-effective alternative, balancing performance and cost efficiently.

Thanks

SR

7 Replies

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0
We run it on all-flash arrays for that exact reason. Searches for emails would be painfully slow if you use multi-tier storage.
0
The search its based on the Index not in the email grp. 99% of the files touch have less than a mouth.
1
Kyle Kerst Replied
11/19/2024 at 9:04 AM
Employee Post
That is a cool idea. I've typically run SmarterMail servers on the Windows side using a Storage Spaces backed array so that this happens automatically (that was their storage tiering system in previous builds of Windows) but there isn't a lot of control or visibility into what goes where. It would be neat to do something like that right inside SmarterMail. In the past I've seen people maintain two copies of a domain to accomplish this, with one of them running on SSD/flash and the other on platters:


With the users keeping their 20 year archives of email on the archive domain and anything recent on the domain itself. That might be a solution you could look at in the meantime.
Kyle Kerst IT Coordinator SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
2
Hi,

We conducted extensive testing with Storage Spaces Tier, but unfortunately, we couldn't achieve the performance required for SM. The results were unsatisfactory, and the system performed quite poorly.

I believe implementing two storage paths per domain should be a relatively "straightforward" solution, and it could have a significant positive impact on our service. It would also greatly increase the amount of storage we can offer to our clients.

Even Microsoft has introduced an archive option within the same mail tree, and they’ve now moved to a separate email tree to support more cost-effective storage solutions. We should take a look to this kind of Sysadmin/infrastructure issues.

Regards,
SR
0
Hello,

I would like to see an online archive (even exchange 2010 had this, if activeated for a user they had like an attached mailbox in outlook, it is possible to determine policies and apply them to users so that for user 1 everything older than 1,5 years -> gets passed to the archive while for user 2 everything older than 2 years goes into the archive) the archivemailbox could be held on another storage)

For me it would be even ok if activating the online archive would reduce another mailbox user in licencing therms or if it would count as an addon (in exchange 2010 it was also not for free)
5
Zach Sylvester Replied
12/2/2024 at 5:04 PM
Employee Post
Hello,

I brought this up during one of our development meetings. In the future, we are planning to support using different storage media for less accessed files. So for instance, if you have emails from 2020 that are not accessed often those would be moved off to a different drive automatically. 

Kind Regards, 
Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
0
@zach That we will be perfect! Or moved to an cheap S3 storage. With a solution like that we can upgrade the account space to be more competitive,

Regards,
SR
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