|
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Are Mailbox Quotas Really Necessary? (Exchange 2003)
Your users’ dependence on email for communicating with their customers and coworkers continues to grow unabated. And as their dependence on email increases, so too do the storage requirements of your email system.
You must balance your users’ insatiable need for storage against the manageability of the overall email system—not an easy job, given that your users also expect zero downtime and your company’s success is directly linked to your ability to keep the email flowing. So how do you decide if quotas are necessary in
your environment?
In the past, mailbox quotas were implemented to prevent a small sub-set of users from monopolizing disk space. But recent advances in storage technology, combined with declining costs for storage media and the increased use of email archiving systems, have many companies questioning the benefits of quotas.
Exchange administrators are under additional pressure because even free email services, like Hotmail and Gmail, offer 2 GB of storage. Your users will inevitably push back on corporate quotas (that they feel negatively impact their productivity) when Google is giving away 2 GB of storage for free.
The Case for Quotas
If you ask any Exchange administrator if it is easier to manage a 500 MB mailbox or a 2 GB mailbox, the answer every time will be the 500 MB mailbox—it is quicker to restore and backup. In addition, smaller mailboxes help keep Exchange databases within easily-manageable parameters.
But databases will not stay at a manageable size by themselves—if you allow your users to manage the size of their own mailboxes, you will end up dealing with very large mailboxes and huge databases. Not only do large mailboxes consume more network bandwidth (an issue that is only partially offset by running Outlook in ‘cached mode’), they are a nightmare for those of us that are responsible for managing the Exchange environment.
Mailbox quotas are an essential safeguard to prevent these problems from occurring.
Email Archiving and Mailbox Quotas If your company has purchased an email archiving system, does it eliminate the need to impose mailbox quotas? Archiving systems typically move data from Exchange to cheaper media - but if quotas are not implemented, what motivation would your users have to delete anything in their inbox (such as all those bad jokes they receive from friends)? And if you are archiving to manage mail store capacity (as opposed to compliance archiving, in which you probably only worry about the Journal mailbox), in the absence of quotas how do you prevent mailboxes from becoming excessively large between scheduled archiving events? Conclusion: Mailbox Quotas = Sound Exchange Management Mailbox quotas are necessary for the health of your Exchange environment.The quotas need not be stingy—you do not want to impede your users from doing their jobs—because even generous quotas will make it easier for you to keep your databases at a manageable size and to manage the network bandwidth consumed by email traffic.But what if your company currently does not have (or worse—does not want) mailbox quotas? What if senior management is preventing you from implementing mailbox quotas?We at ENow have successfully overcome both of the aforementioned objections. In this issue we described why mailbox quotas make for sound Exchange management; in our next issue, we will provide tips on how to ‘sell’ quotas to senior management and to your end users. This article was provided by: Jay Paul Gundotra Labels: Exchange 2003, Qutoa Management
|
