The inconvenient truth: Item counts matter
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2008-08-01The conventional wisdom in the Microsoft Exchange administrator base is that mailboxes are getting too big in terms of size, hence the advent of quotas and email archiving solutions to reduce mailbox sizes.
However, many Microsoft Exchange gurus have now realized that the number of items in a mailbox and a folder matters as much in some cases as the size of the mailbox itself.
Bob Spurzem at Ferris Research points this out on his blog. He refers to a great technical article on Microsoft TechNet on the same topic which includes the following:
Folder contents are stored in a table in the information store database. As the number of items increases, there is a corresponding growth in storage complexity. The storage mechanism for the Exchange store is the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE). ESE uses B+ tree data structures to store records. As the number of records increases, the potential number of disk I/O requests that are required to locate the information and traverse the B+ tree also increases. For more information, see Extensible Storage Engine Architecture.
As the number of items increases, the possibility of any requested data being located on physically adjacent locations on the hard disk is greatly diminished. Therefore, more I/O requests are required.
Martin Tuip, on his Archiving 101 blog, mentioned this issue a few weeks ago as well.
As Martin points out, and as I know from experience, the traditional approach of archiving messages out of Exchange but still replacing them with a small message ("stub") that's a pointer to the original sometimes has challenges. The fact is that if you replace every 5 MB email with a 1 KB email, you'll cut mailbox size but still retain high item count. Indeed, the lack of mailbox size will encourage users to store more items in the long run.
There are a number of solutions to this problem - from:
- Pruning stubs over time (how many on-premise products handle it)
- Not using stubs at all and directing users to search instead
There is no perfect answer here, but users should be aware that mailbox size is only one of several issues to consider.
Quota management: You have better things to do!
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2008-07-31David Sengupta on the Ferris Research blog has a great post on the time people spend managing email.
How much of your time do you spend moving email out of your inbox into Personal Folders (PST files in Microsoft Outlook parlance) to make sure your inbox stays under your email quota? How much time do your users or employees spend doing the same thing?
As I've explained before, I believe filing and foldering is a concept from the paper world that was adopted into the electronic world (where do you think the name "file system" came from?) and grandfathered into the Internet world.
Unfortunately, with the volume of information we deal with every day, I firmly believe that foldering will prove to be unsustainable over time. Google doesn't "folder" the Internet and the company that tried (Yahoo! with its directory) got passed by.
Regardless as to where you stand on that religious debate, foldering email to get under quota is definitely like the Whac-A-Mole game David Sengupta describes.
As he says:
Why not work with the archiving vendors and move data straight to the archive instead of to myriad folders in the inbox?
Well said!
