Before you set up storage for your archives, consider whether you want to use Enterprise Vault's optimized single instance storage. Single instance storage can greatly reduce your storage requirements by sharing the common parts of archived items. However, it can increase the network traffic between the Enterprise Vault servers and the storage devices that host the partitions.
If you intend to use single instance storage, you need to decide on a sharing regime that is appropriate for your requirements and compatible with your network connection speeds.
For Enterprise Vault to be able to create archives, you must create a vault store group that contains a vault store and at least one vault store partition:
A vault store group is a container for vault stores. It defines the outer boundary for sharing items in Enterprise Vault single instance storage.
A vault store is a logical entity to which an Enterprise Vault Storage service archives items. Each vault store has its own vault store database. The vault store database holds information about the archives in the vault store and all the items that are stored in each archive.
A vault store partition is a physical location where Enterprise Vault stores archived data. Each vault store must contain at least one partition. Partitions can be placed on different physical disks and on various types of storage medium. As the data in a vault store grows, you can create more partitions to provide additional capacity. You can configure the partitions so that archiving rolls over from one partition to another when certain criteria are met.
To configure Enterprise Vault single instance storage for a vault store group, you must run the Configure Sharing wizard on the group.
More Information
About Enterprise Vault single instance storage
Developing a suitable sharing regime for Enterprise Vault single instance storage