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Re: Scheduled Archive or Deletion of Email
First, the quick answers to your questions:
- Trash, 1 year; Junk, 30 days
- HSM everything after 4 months. Compression is on on both primary and HSM volumes
- 5gb initial quota. Students don't get an increase, staff/faculty can. We have a zimlet that allows departmental tech support staff to bump quota by 5gb for any user
We have about 60,000 accounts in total across 4 mailbox servers and we're consuming close to 1TB per box for primary store and 2.5TB per box for HSM. That's after 3 years in production and a migration scheme that allowed users to migrate all of their old desktop mail into Zimbra. Right now HSM is on NFS on Sun Thumper boxes but those boxes are now being replaced with new bulk storage and transitioned from NFS to iSCSI/FCAL
We recently completed an RFP for bulk storage, doing a joint RFP between all of the universities in BC. As a result, we got an aggressive price on enterprise-class bulk storage (here bulk == low performance high density SATA and 8x5 support instead of 24x7). The price is well under $1000/usable TB. That's well under $1/GB or under $2/GB if you replicate it. It's not hard to justify spending that kind of money instead of having to pay your staff at $20-$50/hour to sort through old mail. $2 is two minutes of my time and I really doubt I could free 1.5 to 2 GB of mail in 2 minutes (1GB disk == 1.5-2GB of mail due to compression)
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matt Mencel" <MR-Mencel@wiu.edu>
> To: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2011 7:55:09 AM
> Subject: Re: Scheduled Archive or Deletion of Email
>
> Interesting....thanks for everyone's thoughts so far. Here are some
> more details.
>
>
> We HSM at 15 days, delete Junk at 7 days, and delete Trash at 30 days.
> We have 5 mailbox servers with about 7000 accounts each.
>
> The STORE volumes (where new mail sits for 15 days) are sitting about
> 50% full with 25GB of data. These would be full if we kept mail there
> for 30 days.
>
> The HSM volumes are sitting at 90% full with 900GB of data.
>
> We still have a little room left on the SAN that we can grow our HSMs
> another 200GB-300GB maybe which would probably give us another year or
> two of growth.
>
>
> Basically our administration is at the point where they can't or won't
> justify spending a bunch of money (this is Illinois by the way) on
> another SAN to allow people to store mail indefinitely. The lawyers
> are also concerned that we are storing mail indefinitely, though I
> haven't seen any solid legal justification for this concern yet. It's
> being discussed that at some point we may start deleting all mail
> older than X years (3 maybe). We used to do this back in the old
> CCMAIL days and I've been told (since I wasn't around at the time)
> that it was an administration nightmare.
>
> Anyway that's where we're at....and that's what I'm after....to see if
> other schools are deleting all mail older than X period of time and
> seeing how they handle it.
>
> Anyone have an opinion on the cheapest storage you can find out there?
> We've talked about instead of deleting the oldest mail...putting it on
> the cheapest storage we can find, compressing it, and not bother
> backing it up. That would obviously have to be clearly communicated,
> but as an end user I'd rather hear "we keep your oldest email but
> don't back it up" rather than "we delete all your old mail".
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Martin Durand" <mdurand@cegep-ste-foy.qc.ca>
> To: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2011 8:40:38 AM
> Subject: Re: Scheduled Archive or Deletion of Email
>
> Bonjour,
>
> It's pretty much the same thing here... aside from the HSM part. All
> messages are kept in the main storage pools until deleted/expired.
>
> We have a little script that emails us the top hoarders (message box
> higher than 2GB) and we educate them.
>
> Le 11-09-01 09:04, M. Brent Harp a écrit :
> > Here is what we do at the University of Guelph:
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 04:45:13PM -0500, Matt Mencel wrote:
> >> Not so quick poll. This conversation came up today here at WIU...we
> >> have been noticing it might be time to purchase more storage.
> >> Does your university delete messages automatically after a certain
> >> period of time?
> >>
> >> If so...
> >>
> >> What is the time frame?
> > We delete messages from the Trash and Junk/Spam folders after 30
> > days.
> >
> >> Do you only delete certain types of messages, or just attachments?
> > All messages older than 30 days are deleted from the Trash and Spam
> > folders, regardless of attachments or size.
> >
> >> Do you keep compressed archives of old messages?
> > Messages more than 30 days old are moved to secondary storage by
> > Zimbra
> > HSM. Secondary storage is compressed.
> >
> >> Do you allow the end user to decide if/when to archive their old
> >> messages before they are deleted.
> > We move inactive/expired accounts to "closed" status instead of
> > deleting them. Closed accounts are purged from the system a couple
> > of
> > times a year. We started doing this after fielding too many requests
> > to
> > restore deleted accounts from backup. Now if we need to recover an
> > inactive account, we just flip the status back to "active".
> >
> >> What is your reasoning...do you do this because of
> >> FERPA/HIPPA/SOME_OTHER_LEGAL_ISSUE?
> > Our policies have mostly been driven by available storage space.
> > Some
> > people have legal requirements to hold on to email for longer
> > periods. In
> > most of those cases we end up increasing quota. Our base quota is 3
> > GB
> > for staff and faculty.
> >
> > Like most other respondents, when users ask for a quota increase we
> > send them a standard message with tips on managing their mailbox. If
> > more space is still required, we increase quota in 1 GB increments.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Brent
> >
>
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
> Martin Durand, coordonnateur
> Service de l'infrastructure technologique
> Cegep de Sainte-Foy mdurand@cegep-ste-foy.qc.ca
> 2410, chemin Sainte-Foy http://www.cegep-ste-foy.qc.ca
> Quebec, QC, Canada, G1V 1T3 Voix : +1-418-659-6600 #4275
--
Steve Hillman IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960 Simon Fraser University