Instance Storage Quota

Hornbill provides a very flexible elastic storage scheme that gives customers unlimited cloud storage where you only pay for what you actually use.

How does Hornbill measure space used

Hornbill only measures space used by your instances data, it does not measure disk space used by our software or any infrastructure components we deploy in order to deliver the Hornbill service. The measurement is broken down into two separate domains known as "Disk Storage" and "Database Storage". We separate these two for good reason. For "Database Storage" the underlying database we use (MariaDB) and its storage engine determine the space utilised for a given database (each customer instance has its own dedicated database). For "Disk Storage" this is where we store files (see explanation of our Content Addressable File Store technology) below.

Disk Storage

The following elements of your instance contribute towards disk storage usage

• File Attachments (e-mails, posts, entity records, requests, tasks etc...)
• Content Indexes
• Embedded Images
• Documents (uploaded into Document Manager)
• Installed Apps
• Any other large binary object

Database Storage

The following elements of your instance contribute towards database storage usage

• Posts and comments in activities
• Tasks
• Customer, Contact and other Database Record
• Documents (created in Document Manager)
• Business Processes
• Reports
• Any dynamic content thats added to your database through the API's, forms and integrations

Content Addressable File Store

As a general rule, storing large objects such as images, files, videos and other large binary objects it is very inefficient to use an RDBMS as a storage scheme. SQL servers are great for structured data but are far from ideal for storing things like files. Hornbill stores large objects using our own CAFS technology, CAFS stands for "Contact Addressable File Store" which unlike a conventional filesystem has some very unique and desirable properties.

• Content is located by its unique fingerprint which is derived from the actual content of the file being stored.
• Every unique piece of content is atomic and movable
• Content inside a CAFS storage is automatically de-duplicated, in other words the way the CAFS works guarantees that any content stored will only ever be stored once so its very space efficient.
• Content can be easily distributed across physical storage devices/servers/locations/geographies with minimal system management overhead.
• Stale content (that is content that is rarely accessed or is effectively soft archived) can be moved to lower cost storage dynamically ensuring the most accessed and most up to date data is always held on and served high performance storage.

The bottom line is, our storage scheme is fast, efficient and capable of effectively unlimited storage, delivered elastically and with no administrative overhead placed on our customers for management.

Storage Quota and Utilisation

Every Hornbill instance comes with 30Gb of storage and additional storage can be purchased if needed. We audit storage utilisation daily can keep up to ten years of storage utilisation history on the following basis: -

• Daily Database storage used for the last 90 days rolling
• Monthly Database storage used for the last 120 months rolling
• Daily Disk storage used for the last 90 days rolling
• Monthly Disk storage used for the last 120 months rolling

Your storage information can be seen in the Hornbill Administration tool under the "Subscription Overview" section.