Repository
Repositories are tightly coupled with proxy servers. While a single proxy server can host multiple repositories, each repository is uniquely coupled with a single proxy server.
Please also refer to the Proxy section for more details.
Repositories can either be based on Object Storage or Microsoft’s Jet database (.adb). In the latter case this can be on Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Network (SAN) volumes or on a SMB3 Network Attached Storage (NAS) share.
General Best Practices
VCSP and Enterprise setups should always aim for the usage of Object Storage Repositories
Use Object Storage Repositories whenever possible - either on-prem or cloud
Object storage is more future proof. Today it already supports encryption and compression of objects, thus being more secure and space efficient than local Jet databases. Also it scales much better than local Jet databases on the file system and such avoids performance issues.
Avoid very large repositories by separating repositories by data type (Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint) and using multiple repositories per data type when required
You want to avoid very large repositories because handling these becomes complicated in case of migrations and rescans. Larger repositories can be avoided by firstly splitting based on data types but also by splitting the same data type, e.g. based on proxy alignment or business units. Splitting by data type makes additional sense, because characteristics for each data type (Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint) is different and thus it can be handled different in separate repositories.
We consider 200-300 TB as managable size.
It has been observed that large local repositories based on Jet databases tend to get slower by the end of the year until new database files are created with the change to the next year.