1. How many users do you have on your Zimbra server? (1-2, 3-10, 11-24, 25-50, 50-100)
*** 300-400
2. Region? Americas/EMEA/APAC
*** US
3. OS? Redhat/SUSE/Ubuntu/Mac OS X/Fedora/Debian/CentOS/Other:_____
*** CentOS 4.6
4. How important is support? Very Important/Important/Not Important
*** Not important, as long as the software is well documented. As others have suggested, forum support is usually sufficient.
5. Would you consider licensing Zimbra Network Edition instead? Yes/No
*** Yes, we have been and will continue to consider licensing NE, but not necessarily for the hot backup functionality; more for Outlook Connector, mobile support, etc.
6. Any questions, comments, suggestions
*** I would say a $500 one-time fee would be appropriate. I do not like the idea of a per user fee, since the software would be running on the server. You could have one installation with 10 users, each with 10 GB mailboxes, and another with 100 users averaging 1 GB per mailbox and you would essentially be backing up the same amount of data.
Our Zimbra server is behind an email gateway. Currently for backups we shutdown Zimbra in the early morning hours (3-4 AM) and use IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, which allows incremental forever backups, to backup the data. For approximately 150 GB of data we have a down time of around 15-20 minutes, during which time email collects on the gateway, so nothing is lost. For us hot backups is not a "must have" feature, but would be nice, especially if it included other features, like easily restoring an individual mailbox. |