Vote: Hot Backups for FOSS?

[soxfan]

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.

[somz911]

1. 25-50
2. America
3. CentOS
4. Important (as we grow)
5. No (for now)

Would eagerly apply the functionalilty if available.. I do believe that I would be willing to fork out a little to avoid mail being streamed to the next mailhop and maximize uptime through upgrades etc... Pricing... hmm .. it would be a situation where your suggestion would be the starting point.... I think a flat time based license would work for us.... I think if a certain level of support was bundled with this... it would be a great addon to the FOSS product...

[meltingrobot]

1. 75
2. America
3. RHEL4
4. Somewhat
5. I am currently.
6. I'm with the 150$ price for a hot-backup add-on. I don't need this at work since we license NE, but I have contacts that are all the time using poor mail solutions like IMAIL and hosted mail. I keep wanting to recommend the Open Source version of Zimbra, but I can't sell them on it without a way to back it up and protect their data without downtime. I think it would be okay to require a relicense of the backup plugin when updating to a new point 0 release like 4.5 to 5.0. I'm not a fan of the yearly fee idea though.

[natrixgli]

1. 150+
2. North America
3. Ubuntu
4. More of a convenience, really
5. No
6. I would pay a one-time per-server fee, but not more than, say, $500.

-n8

[jrosengren]

1. <20
2. America
3. CentOS
4. Not Important (if it were, I'd buy a supported version)
5. I would license Network Edition if I were offering a paid service or using Zimbra in an enterprise/SMB environment.
6. I would pay $100-200 for a one-time download of a backup addon that I could install on any number of FOSS installations.

[brained]

I think giving attention to the FOSS feature set is good.
Backups, however, are already fairly well covered.

1. Use LVM when you setup your server.
2. Stop the zimbra processes
3. make snapshot
4. Start the zimbra processes
5. use rsync to duplicate the contents of the snapshot
6. delete the snapshot

Perfect once a day backup with maybe 60 seconds total downtime.

Per user pricing for mobile support would be a better area to give attention to the FOSS edition

[isiah]

1. How many users do you have on your Zimbra server? (1-2, 3-10, 11-24, 25-50, 50-100)
2. Region? Americas/EMEA/APAC
3. OS? Redhat/SUSE/Ubuntu/Mac OS X/Fedora/Debian/CentOS/Other:_____
4. How important is support? Very Important/Important/Not Important
5. Would you consider licensing Zimbra Network Edition instead? Yes/No
6. Any questions, comments, suggestions
Hey John... we have been speaking with sales but I have yet to come to a decision that makes sense at this time.

[Russianspi]

It would be really neat to buy NE features piecemail (not just backup) Outlook connector, Mobile, iSync, on a per-user basis. I know this would be a radical shift for Zimbra, but I'll bet that you'd sell a lot more of these features if the barriers to entry weren't so high. In other words, if you made these features user by user plug-ins for the OSS edition, probably almost everyone using that edition would buy at least one user license for a product.

[isiah]

Actually, I second the previous poster's response.

Ala Carte would be the most ideal!

[cornbread]

1. How many users do you have on your Zimbra server? 10
2. Region? America
3. OS? Ubuntu
4. How important is support? Very Important
5. Would you consider licensing Zimbra Network Edition instead? No

First I do want to say this should be done for free. I totally agree with #26

I would be interested in paying a one time fee for hot backups. I will not pay any monthly fee. I would say $100 and I would want it to be able to connect through ssh to put the data remotely via rsync.