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Sorry I didn't really finish the point.

With exchange, we had all of this expensive, reliable SAN storage that would be perfect for a low requirement glacier like solution. Unfortunately, we lacked the ops mojo to pull it off.




Archive is not about iops. its about streaming bandwidth.

for example I used to look after a quantum iScaler 24 drive robot, each drive was capable of kicking out ~100 megabytes a second. It was more than capable of saturating a 40 gig pipe.

However random IO was shite, it could take up to 20 minutes to get to random file. (Each tape is stored in a caddy of (from memory) 10 tapes, There is contention on the drives, and then spooling to the right place on the tape.)

Email is essentially random IO on a long tale. So, unless your users want a 20 minute delay in accessing last year's emails, I doubt its the right fit.

The same applies to Optical disk packs (although the spool time is much less.)


I think that's the point - the e-mail is using up all of the IOPs. There would be a small amount of IOPs left over that could deal with streaming data. The data is unlikely to be accessed on a regular basis. The data not used by e-mail would then be used for the archive - data that's pretty much write-only.


It makes sense for email when you aren't giving your users access to their old email, but storing it for regulatory compliance purposes.


Why do you care how fast you can read it back when you're storing it for regulatory purposes? Isn't that a sunk cost? Buy high capacity, high reliability and don't care for the read speed?




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