Zextras PowerStore is one of the most sought-after add-ons for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, included in the Zextras Suite. This extension allows the addition of hierarchical management of storage in Zimbra and significantly reduces the space occupied by user mailboxes on hard drives through the use of compression and deduplication algorithms. Ultimately, this leads to a substantial reduction in the total cost of ownership for the entire Zimbra infrastructure. When used by SaaS providers, it can represent enormous savings. But this is far from the only capability that this extension can offer a Zimbra administrator. To find out what else Zextras PowerStore can offer Zimbra administrators, we spoke to Luca Arcara, a senior solutions consultant at Zextras who is actively involved in the development of the Zextras Suite. He outlined four key features of Zextras PowerStore that any Zimbra administrator would appreciate.
4. Ability to configure storage after Zimbra installation
In the previous article, we discussed how to optimize Zimbra mail stores to demonstrate their maximum possible performance. In addition to the requirement for a Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition administrator to determine the volumes of mail stores during the infrastructure design phase, one recommendation was to give careful consideration to the number of bytes for inodes, which are created on hard drives by the mke2fs utility and the -i parameter when creating the file system on them.
However, to accurately determine the average message size during the design phase, a system administrator needs to possess a gift of clairvoyance. Of course, such a gift is rare, and parameters like average message size and storage size are better resolved with actual Zimbra performance statistics in 'live' conditions.
And here, Zextras PowerStore comes to the aid of the Zimbra administrator, allowing the use of Hierarchical Media Management to connect additional storage and thus postpone decisions regarding the average message size and data storage volumes until full statistics become available.
3. The ability to avoid using LVM
Logical Volume Management, although an excellent solution that initially seems well-suited for Zimbra's mail storage due to its scalability and snapshot capabilities, has many drawbacks. Key among them are the complexity of volume management compared to regular disks, as well as the high risk of LVM failure if one of the physical drives fails, which is quite critical in large Zimbra installations.
Zextras PowerStore, on the other hand, allows administrators to forgo LVM and expands available capacity by connecting standard hard drives. This enables the Zimbra administrator to simplify storage management and optimize their backup processes, enhancing the overall resiliency of the infrastructure.
2. The ability to migrate data to other volumes and storage
It is always better to prevent a problem than to deal with its consequences later. This principle applies quite well to situations like hard drive failure and the associated total or partial data loss. Scheduled replacement of storage media is a common practice among SaaS providers, as it is easier to plan a maintenance break and notify clients in advance than to incur losses and damage their reputation due to a failing hard drive.
It may seem simple to transfer data from one hard drive to another. Under normal circumstances, this is done using the dd utility, which is included in any Linux distribution. However, it's not that straightforward. In addition to the data, dd will carefully transfer all settings of the old file system to the new disk, depriving you of the ability to modify them. Furthermore, if rootkits or other potentially dangerous viruses have somehow made their way onto the disk, dd will also carefully transfer them to the new hard drive. This is why transferring mailboxes from one disk to another during its planned replacement is best done using Zextras PowerStore. By using this tool, the Zimbra administrator can transfer only the most important items to the new disk — the mailboxes and their contents — while retaining the freedom to configure the file system on it.
In any high-load infrastructure, whether a large enterprise or a SaaS provider, there are mailboxes that must always be accessible. This includes the mailboxes of top managers, customer inquiry mailboxes, and so on. With the stock version, transferring an individual mailbox from a storage that is undergoing maintenance to one that continues to operate is impossible. serverYou can avoid downtime during maintenance of a mail storage where such mailboxes are located by using the Zextras PowerStore extension, which allows for the transfer of individual mailboxes between mail storages within the same Zimbra infrastructure. Thus, Zextras PowerStore can help Zimbra administrators enhance security and significantly reduce downtime when manipulating hard drives.
Additionally, Zextras PowerStore can assist in recovering data from a partially damaged disk. The developers have provided the ability to ignore read errors when transferring mailboxes, so in situations where the data carrier has started to develop bad blocks, PowerStore still gives the administrator the chance to recover most of the information from it.
1. The ability to connect object storage
The main feature of Zextras PowerStore, according to Luca Arcara, is the ability to hot-connect object storage to the Zimbra infrastructure, which allows administrators to quickly access all the benefits of using both cloud storage and locally deployed services.
Considering that many cloud providers today offer access to their storage on a subscription model, Zimbra administrators have endless opportunities for backing up and scaling their infrastructure, as well as implementing hardware redundancy at very reasonable costs.
Moreover, the ability to store some data in the cloud or in geographically remote storages accelerates the recovery process of Zimbra in case of significant incidents, greatly enhancing the security of this solution within an enterprise.
Source: habr.com
