Show-Tell-Thursday with second guest entry
CategoryYes its Wednesday - I know, but I fly out this evening to a place where the chance of me getting wireless access is nil (security is high). Bob Warth was again good enough to pass on an admin/architecture tip that he has implemented in his environment. I have copied in the email below. It definitely is an unusual setup, and one that could cause some interesting discussion.
"Passive Archiving
When we converted from cc:Mail to Notes mail in 1998 we had a fairly high percentage of mobile users, the model of a local copy of mail and directory was a natural concept, so I decided to configure EVERYBODY that way, even people who only used mail from a desktop PC in the office. This setup allowed me to run a lot more users per server, it gave users snappier response when opening large e-mails, and it simplified support calls as the techs didn't have to spend any time figuring out how a caller was configured.
OK, that was then, we still run the same way today because all of the benefits are still valid. The main change is that now when I tell IBMers how we're setup they don't stare at me with puzzled expressions anymore (I think they even have a name for this configuration.)
And now another benefit has fallen out of the trees, practically for free, which for lack of a better term we refer to as "passive archiving". Gone are the days of enforcing quotas, and gone are the days of cajoling users to purge and/or archive old mail. Each user has a full replica of their mail on their local drive, plus a replica on each of 2 clustered servers. When the server replicas get above a certain size, I run a little utility that turns on the SpaceSaver setting "Remove documents not modified in the last 90 days" on both server replicas. Nothing magic about 90, could be any number, but 90 works well for me because of our tape retention strategy where I know any particular e-mail is on at least 3 different tapesets that are marked for permanent retention.
So, the servers now retain only 90 days worth of anyone's mail, and predicting future disk and tape requirements is a lot simpler. Meanwhile on the client side their local replica continues to retain ALL mail -- as much as they want for as long as they want. AND, they no longer have to pull mail out of their local replica into a local archive in order to clean old mail off my servers -- they can keep everything in one local NSF instead of two, if they want. In essence, this one local NSF becomes an archive without the user taking any action, hence the term "passive
archiving""
Local mail files and replication is a good idea, especially when consolidating servers and making more use out of the client. The addition of the "passive archiving" makes it an interesting setup, and I have never seen it implemented on production sites in that manner. Any thoughts guys?
Again, a huge thank you to Bob for mailing me with these thoughts. Keep 'em coming. This stuff provides real value to the blogs!
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