Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

Vault store groups and vault stores installation planning

Vault stores are contained in vault store groups. A vault store group defines the outer boundary for sharing items in Enterprise Vault single instance storage.

See About single instance storage.

A vault store can comprise one or more partitions. A vault store partition resides on a storage device. When you set up Enterprise Vault, you specify on which device each partition is created.

If a partition is created on an NTFS volume set, it must be contained within a single NTFS volume set, and cannot span volume sets. Bear in mind that a volume set can contain multiple physical disks, so your partition can be spread over more than one disk. There can be more than one partition on an NTFS volume set. If you need to create or extend NTFS volume sets to accommodate the partition, use the Windows Administrative Tools.

The first two items in this list give you some idea of the amount of space that you would need in the vault store for one day, before any savings due to single instance storage or compression.

Single instance storage and compression can provide significant savings in storage space.

If you use expiry to delete archived items automatically at the end of their retention period, then the amount of space required will not increase as much over longer periods.

If you set up an aggressive archiving policy that archives items from the archiving targets after about two weeks, users are likely to want to access those items frequently. Keep the archived items online in the vault store for a period of time so users can easily restore them. You will need adequate online space to accommodate the data in the vault stores.

If, on the other hand, you set up archiving so that items are not archived from the archiving targets for about six months or a year, users are much less likely to want to access the archived items. You could then almost immediately move the archived items from the vault stores to secondary storage.

You can select a default vault store for archives when creating archiving targets.

For Exchange mailbox archiving, you can select a different vault store at provisioning group, Exchange Server or Enterprise Vault server level. For public folder archiving, you can select a different vault store at Exchange Server or Enterprise Vault server level. For Domino mailbox archiving, you can select a different vault store at provisioning group or Domino Server level.

The vault store selected will be used for automatically-enabled archives associated with the target. Similarly, for SharePoint archiving, the vault store selected for a target will be used for any auto-enabled site collection archives associated with the target.

The vault store databases do not need to be on the same computer as the vault stores. The databases are managed using SQL Enterprise Manager.

See Enterprise Vault databases and planning their installation.