Archive server with large remote disk store

[frankchavez]

Hello,

I'm trying to find the best way to do this and wanted to get input from others before starting.
I'm setting up a new mailbox server for all of our archive email accounts.
We've done some rough estimating and determined that at this point in time we'll need about 15TB to cover next 2-3 years worth of archives.
The server will be a virtual machine in vSphere 4.1 environment.

I've got the 15TB set aside already. The only way I'm seeing to get all 15TB into a single volume on a VMWare virtual machine would be to mount it inside the guest OS. I know NFS isn't supported so I was looking at iSCSI.
Has anyone done such a setup before? Would this be the correct way to go about it or is there a better solution?

Thanks.

[lytledd]

We export the account to a .gz file and burn it to a Dual Layer DVD.

If we need access to the account, we restore it to an OSE box and point the manager at the IP address.

When they are done with the account, I remove it from the OSE box and put the DVD back into the safe.

Doug