White space defrag on Exchange 2003 and large snapshots via SME

[BrendonHiggins]

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

[tyeoman_swinton]

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...

[tekaravind]

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

[BrendonHiggins]

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

[radek_kubka]

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

[BrendonHiggins]

That is with archiving.