Microsoft IT just released a new IT Showcase whitepaper that you might find very interesting. Here is what the problem they were trying to solve was, and the solution:
Situation:
Microsoft IT ...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
@Alex
The reason why we force users to a standard for mailbox (and mail) size is because we have to in order to provide the required service to the business within the SLA's that they require. My company hosts 25,000 mailboxes but could expand to host 500,000 or more mailboxes within the space of a month, all because of how we designed our messaging infrastructure (hint, think scalability). Mailbox limits are a huge part of that, we know *exactly* how big our mailboxes will get so we know *exactly* how much storage to purchase for each Storage Group, and we never have to worry about expanding the storage assigned to a Storage Group, and considering the storage was 2/3 of the cost of our infrastructure that kind of control was critical in being able to provide what the business needed.
@Manoj
If you have a strict policy and enforcement on mailbox size then using DAS with Exchange 2007 actually becomes quite desirable, you always know how much space the Exchange server will be using (assuming you have the max number of users on it), and because you design with E2K7's 64 bit memory usage in mind you can get a much better space usage scenario than you did with Exchange 2003, where the number of spindles was more critical than the amount of space available. DAS may still not fit into other application scenarios, but with the changes to Exchange 2007, and proper designing, you could move off of the SAN and onto DAS, saving a lot of money as well as simplifying your Exchange environment (which is always a good thing). And in our case our storage team will love us as well, they hate that we have dedicated SAN's for Exchange 2003 while everything else is on shared SAN's.
The reason why we force users to a standard for mailbox (and mail) size is because we have to in order to provide the required service to the business within the SLA's that they require. My company hosts 25,000 mailboxes but could expand to host 500,000 or more mailboxes within the space of a month, all because of how we designed our messaging infrastructure (hint, think scalability). Mailbox limits are a huge part of that, we know *exactly* how big our mailboxes will get so we know *exactly* how much storage to purchase for each Storage Group, and we never have to worry about expanding the storage assigned to a Storage Group, and considering the storage was 2/3 of the cost of our infrastructure that kind of control was critical in being able to provide what the business needed.
@Manoj
If you have a strict policy and enforcement on mailbox size then using DAS with Exchange 2007 actually becomes quite desirable, you always know how much space the Exchange server will be using (assuming you have the max number of users on it), and because you design with E2K7's 64 bit memory usage in mind you can get a much better space usage scenario than you did with Exchange 2003, where the number of spindles was more critical than the amount of space available. DAS may still not fit into other application scenarios, but with the changes to Exchange 2007, and proper designing, you could move off of the SAN and onto DAS, saving a lot of money as well as simplifying your Exchange environment (which is always a good thing). And in our case our storage team will love us as well, they hate that we have dedicated SAN's for Exchange 2003 while everything else is on shared SAN's.