topic Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME in Data Protection

White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

BrendonHiggins — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:18:42 GMT

Every day our delta from just one of our Exchanges server is 19 Gb! Some of this is email and some of it is caused by moving mail to reclaim white space in the mail data stores. The problem is, we snapvault the data for years and the solution is using a great number of shelves. Is there a method of reclaiming whitespace which will not change the inodes or reclaiming the space?

SIS is not an option due to the 4 Tb volume limit on the FAS3140.

Thanks for the help and ideas.

Bren

Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

tyeoman_swinton — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:36:06 GMT

Is the 4TB limit with SIS on FAS3140's a memory constraint? Its really starting to cause us issues as we are at a point where we will need to split data between volumes making life alot more complicated. I think even the bigger 2xxx series has a higher limit than the 3140...

Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

tekaravind — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:38:45 GMT

Bren,

I thought one of the newer versions of Snapdrive for Windows had a space reclamation feature that helps release the unused blocks on the filer.

http://partners.netapp.com/go/techontap/matl/space_reclamation.html

does this help?

Cheers,

Aravind

Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

BrendonHiggins — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:43:05 GMT

Online defrag moves mailboxes between data stores so the changes are true changes at inode level but the amount of mail is the same, so I am in effect 'wasting' disks with this method.

Bren

Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

radek_kubka — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:30:32 GMT

Hi Bren,

Tricky one, I must say... If you have a real need to do Exchange defragmentation, then there isn't much you can do to avoid snapshots getting bigger.

Are you saying though your Exchange data is over 4TB? Did you ever consider implementing archiving, e.g. Enterprise Vault?

Regards,

Radek

Re: White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

BrendonHiggins — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:09:05 GMT

That is with archiving.