Thanks Ginger. I had to go back and reread things a few times. What had me confused was the paragraph that said:

Another mailbox-store database for information on voice messages that are saved in that mailbox store. The database is presized for an average of approximately 40 messages each for 10,000 users, or about 1.25 GB. (The database application currently being used for Connection cannot dynamically resize a database after it is created.)

After reviewing the calculations, although the mailstore database is sized for 10,000 users, the mailstore itself is only sized for 1000 users.

Now I understand why the option to have multiple datastores. We will be doing some load testing, sending multiple messages to all subscriber distribution lists to try and load up the database and test backup times.

Can I barge in to the conv? I think I'll have a similar problem with 8000 users on my system.

does the online help suggest that multiple message stores would be backed up simultaneously? otherwise there's no advantage is there?

I'm not sure about that. From what I gather, the backup process is sequential. It backs up each object in a row.

As far as your user space is concerned, it's not number of users, but diskspace. Granted, the more users, the more disk space, but just to be clear.

I'm in the middle of load testing our server and performing a backup. I'll post the results when I'm done with some details for comparison. I'm really hoping that it doesn't take 6 hours to back the thing up. I've got the mail store to about 13.5 gig of data (I had to cheat using a sendmail and a large datafile) so it's a good test bed I think.

thanks for that... be great to see your results.

I did a quick google on the "3Gb/Hr for backups" assumption, and that appears to be slow even for tape, so hopefully should be way under 6hrs....Rgds...MS.

Just completed our load test. I was hoping for better results, but quite honestly, I can't complain.

Source:

Cisco Unity Connection 7.0(2)

HP Equivalent 7845

1000mbps port

Dest:

Dell PowerEdge 2950 III w/ RAID6

2x1000mbps bonded NIC

freesshd SFTP server

L2 Intermediary Switch:

Catalyst 4948

L3 Information:

L2 switch uplinked to Cat6K w/ FWSM

src/dest hosts on different VLANs

Message Store Size:

13.5 Gig

Time to complete:

~15 minutes

Peak traffic:

130 mbps

I'll have to talk to our network guys (my network hat is getting old) to see if there is something we can do to improve. I recall reading somewhere that in order to use GE speeds effectively you needed to enable giant frames.

Not sure I have that option on Unity Connection, but I do see MTU settings.

Again, 15 minutes is quite good. However, we will eventually have up to 10 servers backing up to this host, so the faster the better.