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Best Practices for store size and mailbox size

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Best Practices for store size and mailbox size - 25.Jun.2008 12:14:28 PM

goody3335

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Joined: 25.Jun.2008
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I have one front end exchange 2003 server and two back end exchange 2003 servers that are clustered. I'd like to find out what best practices are for the size of the information stores and the individual mailboxes. I realize this is somewhat subjective, but I'm looking to minimize our stores and would like to show my boss why I think they're getting out of control. We have 2 stores that are each 100GB and only 350 users. I'd like to set up quotas based on the best practices. Thanks for your help!

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RE: Best Practices for store size and mailbox size - 25.Jun.2008 12:28:42 PM

mark@mvps.org

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Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
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Mailbox sizes are pretty irrelevant. If you get too many (5000) items per folder in Outlook you're going to get client-side performance suckery but that's an Outlook thing, not Exchange really.

Mail store sizes are around about the 200GB level according to MS articles you can browse for both on microsoft.com and the exchange team blog. Of course, that 200GB is really based on the speed of recovery rather than how big the file actually is. If you've got a cheap cruddy tape then 100GB might be too big because it takes longer than you want/need to get it back. If you have a SAN with snapshot capabilities then 350/400GB might be fine because you can restore the whole thing inside minutes.

Like you say, all very subjective.
The mailboxes you have are only about half a gig on average which isn't much. I wouldn't be spending much time getting the storage down. Perhaps there's some mileage in calling out the selfish gits who have 3GB mailboxes that might be denying 100MB users from having larger mailboxes but that's your call. An averae of 500MB per mailbox is perfectly fine.

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