Best way to store data, users and 600 large mailbox?

[halley]

Good afternoon,
currently have a Zimbra server / FOSS, with 600 users using POP / SMTP no message is stored on the server. Now we are thinking of putting IMAP for all users and mailboxes are great, I wonder what better way to store this data externally? on the server itself? The problem is the size of the file that will not stop growing ...


Could someone give testimonies of how they successfully?

Thanks

[fcash]

2100 users, all data stored on server, only 300 GB of storage used (Zimbra has been online for just under a year). No quotas set.

If you don't want storage to spiral out of control (although for 600 users, it shouldn't) just set quotas, and buy enough disk to handle it all. With 1 GB of storage per person, you could stuff it all on a single 1 TB disk.

[halley]

Originally Posted by fcash

2100 users, all data stored on server, only 300 GB of storage used (Zimbra has been online for just under a year). No quotas set.

If you don't want storage to spiral out of control (although for 600 users, it shouldn't) just set quotas, and buy enough disk to handle it all. With 1 GB of storage per person, you could stuff it all on a single 1 TB disk.

the problem is that many users download files via email and I will put all the files from Outlook. pst stored in zimbra .... this is my concern.

What do you think of creating the e-mail boxes on another server??

hugs

[ewilen]

What do you mean by "pst stored in zimbra" vs. "e-mail boxes" on another server?

I don't have much experience with Outlook IMAP (we use ZCO here) but generally the way it works is, Outlook maintains a local cache of the folders that you see in your Zimbra web interface. Then if you wish you can also move mail out of those online folders into offline folders contained in .pst files.

As for where to store the .pst files, the answer is: the only approach supported by Microsoft is to put them on users' machines; see Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link. If you read the kb article and are willing to deal with the issues, you can try putting the .pst files onto a file server.

The mail that's stored on Zimbra should be handled by setting a quota and adding storage to Zimbra as necessary, possibly in conjunction with the HSM feature.

[fcash]

Originally Posted by halley

the problem is that many users download files via email and I will put all the files from Outlook. pst stored in zimbra .... this is my concern.

Then you put quotas on the e-mail accounts, and tell them to save the attachments to their local disk, and delete the e-mail.

Or, you teach them to use something else for transferring files (we have a 20 MB limit on e-mail attachments, for example).

Or, you buy enough disk to hold it all (our mail server has 500 GB of virtual disk, with a couple of TB available if needed).

By keeping it all on one server, backups are a lot simpler. For example, how do you recover from "I downloaded my e-mail yesterday, and today my laptop harddrive is dead, but I really need the files that came in via e-mail yesterday"?

With IMAP, it's easy, as the files are stored on the server, meaning their backed up via the server backup process.

POP3 is dead, and no one should be using it for anything.