Splitting Exchange DB into Multiple DB's

[tekskin]

We have 3 x DL380's running W2K SP3 and E2K (all latest patches).

We have about 800 mailboxes split across 3 Exchange Servers, with DB's of 40Gb, 60Gb & 76Gb.

We are thinking about splitting the DB's to improve our restore times in the event of failure, but I have a concern.

If we split a DB, and data sent from one mail account to another is not on the same DB, will it duplicate this information in the new DB, thereby increasing the overall Disk Space used?

e.g. a user on server 1 sends an email with an attachment to 3 people on the same server. When the database is split, 2 of the people are in the new DB, and the others are in the old DB. Has the email been duplicated in the new DB to allow the person to read it, or does it show the message but not the attachment?

Kevin

 

[MarkSe]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;198673

should deal with a lot of your questions, at the end of the day SIS is desinged more for performance than space saving at the end of the day it also depends how you have your departments organised (the saving is always going to be minimal). One thing you could do is check in Perfmon to see what ratio you have now? (I would suspect its quite low).

PS: Move mail box and ExMerge also break SIS.

Mark

 

[MarkSe]

I have looked into this for you and in Exchange 2000 SIS is definitely DB level not SG level. In that respect you are going to require a little more space.... but bear in mind my first posting.

HTH,

Mark

 

[tekskin]

Thanks for your help MarkSe, we are going to look at the possibility of re-organising the departments on the server, and try to improve the performance.

kevinede