Running out of disk space

When managing an e-mail system one of the most uncalled for things to happen is for your system to run out of disk space. Well, that is what happened here yesterday after I left. One thing that is different from where I work now than what I have experience before, is that they allow some mail users to have no limit at all, making it hard to plan for the overall storage requirements. Even with that said, I still can’t find an excuse for it. While most of this infrastructure and procedures were developed well before I started working here, I still feel like a complete idiot. I don’t know why, but this really pisses me off. Alerts were sent out regarding disk space for some time before the incident, but nothing was done. When I asked about the procedure that should be followed to resolve such an event, I got a few different answers, and nothing in writing. If you ask me, the organization has deemed running out of disk space something that is perfectly ok, of course, that is not the case, when the disk space runs out, a couple of hundred users are suddenly left without e-mail functionality. We really need to change the way we operate, unfortunately, it seems that our leadership still hasn’t realized that. It will probably just be added to the Exchange 2003 project, fun.