Corporate servers and space-hogs

[Morgaine]

Hi everyone,

I've recently inherited about twenty servers from a predecessor that shall remain nameless, because I tend to spit whenever his name is mentioned. Regardless, the point is that he never implemented any quality controls on the servers, no disk quotas and no restrictions on what people are allowed to store on the servers, with the end result being that we're sitting with some users taking up 300GB or so of space. These aren't legal documents, such as departmental project plans and Visio drawings and the like, but archives of old joke e-mails, music, movies and (I am sneakily certain) less savoury materials as well. This drives me to teeth-grinding irritation, since I don't particularly want the label of the only server admin that can open up a bootlegging hip-hop shop with the file contents on her own servers.

Now, since I have to give my boss some recommendations, I've started to think of the whole matter, and would like the community's opinion: what would be a decent enough quota for work-related backup and items for a corporate user?

[Valerion]

Depends on the user and what they do, really.

CEO's and IT managers tend to want unrestricted access.

You need to firstly divide your users into categories. Let's take a manufacturing plant, for example.

1) The receptionist likely needs very little storage space
2) The sales staff probably needs an intermediate amount, mostly in email
3) The design engineers probably needs a lot, because they store drawings, mostly in file server space

I would say 1 GB is plenty for most email users. File share space is more tricky, but I would probably not go over 1-5 GB there either. But look at their profiles carefully. Ask the different managers for suggestions (middle management needs a reason to exist) and have the users apply for space expansion. If you find they regularly ask, you either need to investigate them, or you under-provisioned them. If none in a team ever asks for expansion, you probably over-provisioned them.

Make sure users use the correct storage area (don't email 30/100MB drawings around, rather use a shared file share area).