Save emails on NAS

[Drox]

I am currently looking at setting up Zimbra as a replacement for the current service provider that we have. We have had nothing but problems with them. So far I have installed the latest build (that I am aware of) and have fallen in love with it. Currently we cannot get approval for the Network Edition but I am still working on that mainly for backup features and HAS.

Back to the question at hand. We are going to be implementing this company wide and currently have around 250-300 employees that are going to be using the system. I have tried to do as much research as possible, but was not able to find a lot of information regarding this topic.

Is it possible to store all emails on a NAS device? It will be connected up via gigabyte connection to the Zimbra server and will be literally right above it in the rack.

We are on a pretty strict budget for this implementation and I am trying to make the most out of it. Has anyone tried this before? I am sure there has been someone who has. If so, what issues did you run into (i.e. latency, failure, slow read speeds, etc.)? The little bit of information that I have come across has said not to use NAS but did not explain why.

Any help in the topic would be great. Thanks.

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Indeed some people have reported issues with using NAS, but others have had no problems at all. Could you explain how you shall present the storage to the ZCS server ie. CIFS, iSCSI. This will have quite a bit of bearing on how best to achieve the solution. If you could post your full HW specs that would be even better

[Drox]

Originally Posted by uxbod

Welcome to the forums

Indeed some people have reported issues with using NAS, but others have had no problems at all. Could you explain how you shall present the storage to the ZCS server ie. CIFS, iSCSI. This will have quite a bit of bearing on how best to achieve the solution. If you could post your full HW specs that would be even better

Thank you for the reply.

We are still in the planning phase and very much open for suggestions or comments. So far this is the equipment we are looking into:

HP Proliant DL360 G5 with 8GB ram and 4x74GB SCSI drives most likely in Raid 1 configuration

Linksys NAS 2TB chassis

We are planning on connecting them together using CIFS.

[p24t]

We use a network storage cluster here, and it's attached over NFS. (I've heard that NFS isn't necessarily recommended, so YMMV) I have a fairly small userbase (75 or so) and we usually do about 300m of traffic per day. Running over GigE is plenty fast for what we do here, I've never heard any complaints about speed, and my network utilization isn't enough to worry about.

I've got my /redolog, /backup, and /store all on the network storage. It takes about 3-4 hours for the full backup (i know you're on OSS) but backing up about 250G of email takes a while.

[Drox]

Originally Posted by p24t

We use a network storage cluster here, and it's attached over NFS. (I've heard that NFS isn't necessarily recommended, so YMMV) I have a fairly small userbase (75 or so) and we usually do about 300m of traffic per day. Running over GigE is plenty fast for what we do here, I've never heard any complaints about speed, and my network utilization isn't enough to worry about.

I've got my /redolog, /backup, and /store all on the network storage. It takes about 3-4 hours for the full backup (i know you're on OSS) but backing up about 250G of email takes a while.

Thanks for the reply. Glad to hear you are running over the network just fine, it is promising for our implementation.

We are planning on getting two of those NAS devices and keeping them synced with each other as well as having a backup server in case of hardware failure. Basically we are going to have a complete backup system so in the event that something happens to one all we have to do is change over the IP address and we will be up and operational again.