In "Top Exchange Design Considerations," January 2006, Instant-Doc ID 48307, I presented four key architectural principles—simplicity, integration, cost, and efficiency—and gave you some tips for how to launch an Exchange Server design by documenting your business and design requirements and planning your Active Directory (AD) and hardware requirements. Let's go over six more steps that are invaluable in designing a successful, efficient Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Server organization.
#5: Spend Time with Storage-Group and Database Design
In my previous article, I discussed the importance of sizing up your hardware, giving each storage group (SG) a dedicated disk volume and devoting time and attention to planning the disk subsystem. The same advice and cautions that apply to SGs apply to the Exchange databases. From a design perspective, a database serves one of two primary purposes: to support mailbox polices (which are applied at the database level) or to address recovery times. Therefore, your database design should be driven by business requirements, as I explained in the previous article. Spreading mailboxes across many smaller databases can support faster recovery times and limit the impact of a database outage. However, you also need to consider the type of backup and restore you plan to implement, as the example in the sidebar "Recovery Times in Database Design," page 6, explains. . . .
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