Andy Kemp

I don’t know about you but I am finding that I have the same files on more than one, and some times more than 2 PC’s, all of which are connected to the same network at some point in time, and all are connected to the internet.

I started making good use of my Sky Drive (this offers you 25GB of free space and is part of the Windows Live family)

However…

I recently found another service called ADrive and they offer you 50GB of free storage.

They have 3 different services a free one which is always good called basic :) a Signature package that is $6.95 a month again for 50GB and a Premium service starting at $13.95 a month and offering you 100GB to 1TB of storage.

The Basic package is just as it is, a 50GB store with them, no encryption etc… the Signature has a few extra’s thrown in with it.

Check out: http://www.adrive.com/plans for the difference in the 3 plans

At the moment both the priced plans offer a 14-Day trial, I have not yet taken it out but I would seriously consider it as using a desktop client or FTP program to upload documents would be very handy.

We have started to encourage our users to utilise public folders more, i.e. move all email that they do not need on a daily basis to their own public folder, as this will help keep our Exchange Mail Stores to a minimum!

We did have a dedicated Exchange Server for Public Folders, one of our older Exchange boxes running Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000. This server had a Data store in the excess of 130GB and there was only 150GB of disk space, so if we wanted users to make good use of the store then we would need to provide the disk space for it!

The reason for trying to force the users to use Public Folders was due to having very large Mail Stores. Our Edinburgh Partner store alone had an edb file in the excess of 68.5GB and a stm file of 27GB.
In total our Edinburgh Exchange server had a total of 273GB disk space and at this moment in time only 25GB free, so that is almost 250GB of Exchange data for 150/170 users!

Our Glasgow Exchange server has a total of 135GB of disk space and only 26GB free so that is almost 110GB used for a maximum of 50 Users! So for in the excess of 220 users we have a staggering 360GB of exchange data.

We do try to encourage our users to archive but a solicitor never knows when they might need that email from 2001 in their inbox!

We have looked at archiving solutions both as an in house solution and as a managed service but with the current economic climate we could not get the budget to go ahead with either of those. So we did a bit of server juggling and managed to free up one of our Proliant DL380’s with 1.5 TB of disk space on RAID 5, ok so not ideal but for the size of the exchange organisation but I think that it will suffice!

So the idea is to utilise this freshly installed server as a new Exchange Server within the existing Exchange Organisation and replicate the public folders on the older server (MX3) to the new one (MAIL1). Then once that has been replicated start moving some of the mailboxes on the existing Edinburgh Exchange Server onto the new server.

The Public Folder replication has now been running for about 10days and is almost complete sitting at 173GB out of 190GB (for some reason the original Public Folder store grew during the replication, the only explanation I could give was that users were moving email to their PF during the replication). So, during the replication I then had another problem, my source server ran out of disk space! So I had to run a backup of the server (I just used ntbackup) and then restored the server onto a virtual server running on a Dell GX620 with a 1TB Disk. OK so this isn’t really ideal for production but, it would suffice for the transition period from MX3 to MAIL1.

Once the replication has completed I plan to dismount MX3's PF Store and see what happens form there. If there are no issues I can then decommission that server and take it off virtual.

I can then monitor the performance of this server moving more mailboxes onto it periodically and then if it is performing well I will then decommission the original Edinburgh Exchange server.

We are using the Mimecast Multi option, which keeps all our emails on their systems for 10 years, however you cannot really file emails in that as you do with Public Folders and email folders, so this is why we decided to go down this route. Once budgets are opened up again we may look at an alternate route but for now this is out only viable solution.

I was reading in the Metro on my way into the office today that Google have released Google Latitude. This is a free tool from Google that will allow you to track your friends movements based on the location of their Mobile phone. I am not too sure yet how it actually works, but I think that it uses the mobile towers.

Some people are a bit concerned that it could be used to invade people’s privacy, however through setting it up and playing around with it you only add those people who you want to actually know where you are at any point in time!

At the moment it only works on a few mobile devices, but they are saying that it will work on both iphones and ipod touch soon… if it uses the Mobile Cell infrastructure to determine where you are then how can it work on an ipod touch? some people say it locates you based on your IP address, however I cannot see how that will work. If I had a wireless in the office connected to the LAN and used that then it would put me in Harrogate and into in Edinburgh (where I am) as our internet IP is down in Harrogate.