3 key benefits of subdividing the Storage groups in Exchange 2007
August 12th, 2007 by ShajiFiroz
With Exchange 2007 enterprise edition, administrators can subdivide the storage groups up to 50 independent units whereas Standard Edition allows only maximum 5 storage groups. In Exchange 2003, the corresponding limits were 20 & one. There has been always requirements from companies to subdivide its users within the multiple storage groups for various reasons from its organizations such as, VIP, Legal users, sales, marketing, HR etc. I believe following are the 3 key reasons why companies requests for subdividing the storage groups in Exchange 2007.
- Mitigating the data disaster – if users are spread across multiple storage group databases, the single storage group catastrophe affects only part of the organization. So the benefit here is like partial high availability of employees in such events where one of the storage groups becomes unavailable within the Exchange 2007 environment.
- Greater reduction in restoring the system – Data for a single storage group can be restored more quickly from backup than the entire message database. This is great! Isn’t it? I remember the instance where my customer had only one Storage Group in Exchange 2000, and it caused about a day productivity lost for the entire organization as the data corruption happened just about the day began! Hmm… We could have avoided this to great deal if we had exchange 2007 released that time and implemented storage group subdivisions. J
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Flexible Administration – breaking the storage group into multiple databases provides easy way to delegate accountability for specific groups of users to different administrators. You can give different groups of users different mailbox attributes, for example, mailbox storage capacity limits. You have the convenience of defining different service level agreements (SLA) for different set of users, for example, take more frequent backups for your legal department & assign different mailbox quota for VIP users.
In short, Microsoft Exchange 2007 enterprise edition (EE) will still make substantial differentiation by offering maximum 50 Storage groups compared to Standard Edition’s 5 storage groups. So Exchange EE edition is recommended if you want to make use of the above benefits to its fullest. See the table here in a glance to see the highlights of difference between Standard Edition & Enterprise Edition.
