Zextras PowerStore is one of the most requested add-ons for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite included with Zextras Suite. The use of this extension, which allows you to add hierarchical media management to Zimbra, as well as seriously reduce the hard drive space occupied by user mailboxes through the use of compression and deduplication algorithms, ultimately leads to a serious reduction in the cost of ownership of the entire Zimbra infrastructure. And when Zextras PowerStore is used in a SaaS environment, the savings can be enormous. But this is not all the possibilities that this extension can offer the Zimbra administrator. To find out what else Zextras PowerStore has to offer for a Zimbra administrator, we reached out to Luca Arcara, Senior Solutions Consultant at Zextras, who is actively involved in the development of the Zextras Suite. He gave us four key Zextras PowerStore features that any Zimbra administrator would love.
4. Ability to configure media after installing Zimbra
In the last article, we talked about how you can optimize Zimbra mail stores so that they can demonstrate the highest possible performance. In addition to the fact that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition administrator needs to determine the amount of mail storage at the infrastructure design stage, one of the recommendations was to carefully select the number of bytes for inodes that are generated on hard drives by the mke2fs utility and the -i parameter when creating file system on them.
However, in order to accurately determine the average message size at the design stage, the system administrator needs to be clairvoyant. Of course, only a few have such a gift, and it is still better to decide such parameters as the average message size and the size of the drive, having in hand the statistics of Zimbra's work in "combat" conditions.
And here the Zextras PowerStore extension comes to the aid of the Zimbra administrator, which, thanks to the ability to use Hierarchical Media Management, allows you to connect an additional drive and thereby postpone making decisions about the average message size and data storage volumes until full statistics appear.
3. Ability to avoid using LVM
The logical volume manager, although it is an excellent solution, which, at first glance, is great for Zimbra mail storage due to the ability to expand and take snapshots, it still has a lot of disadvantages. The key ones are volume management that is more complicated than conventional disks, as well as a high probability of failure of the entire LVM if one of the physical media is damaged, which is quite critical when it comes to large-scale Zimbra installations.
Zextras PowerStore, in turn, allows you to abandon the use of LVM and makes it possible to expand the available volume by connecting conventional hard drives. This allows the Zimbra administrator to simplify the management of drives as much as possible, and at the same time optimize the backup process and, thereby, make the entire infrastructure more fault-tolerant.
2. Ability to transfer data to other volumes and drives
Any problem is always better to prevent than to eliminate its consequences later. This rule is quite true for such a situation as the failure of a hard drive and the accompanying complete or partial loss of data. Planned replacement of storage media is a fairly common practice among SaaS providers, who find it easier to schedule a preventive pause and warn customers about it in advance than to incur losses and spoil their image due to an untimely failure of a hard drive.
It would seem, what could be easier than transferring data from one hard drive to another? Under normal circumstances, this is done using the dd utility, which is included with any Linux distribution. However, not all so simple. In addition to the data, dd will carefully transfer all the settings of the old file system to the new disk and make it impossible for you to change them. Also, if rootkits and other potentially dangerous viruses have somehow got onto the disk, dd will also carefully transfer them to the new hard disk. That is why mailboxes from one disk to another during its planned replacement are best with the help of Zextras PowerStore. Thanks to its use, the Zimbra administrator gets the opportunity to transfer only the most important things to the new disk - mailboxes and their contents, while gaining freedom in setting up the file system on it.
Also, in any highly loaded infrastructure, whether it is a large enterprise or a SaaS provider, there are mailboxes that must be constantly accessible. This applies to mailboxes of top managers, mailboxes for requests from clients, and so on. When using the stock version, it is not possible to move a single mailbox from a store that is being shut down for maintenance to a server that is still running. You can also avoid downtime during the maintenance of the mail store where such mailboxes are located, using the Zextras PowerStore extension, which allows you to transfer individual mailboxes between mail stores located in the same Zimbra infrastructure. In this way, Zextras PowerStore can help the Zimbra administrator improve security as well as significantly reduce downtime when performing hard drive manipulations.
In addition, Zextras PowerStore can help you rescue data from a partially damaged drive. The developers have provided the ability to ignore read errors when migrating mailboxes, so in a number of situations when the data carrier has already begun to be covered with bad blocks, thanks to PowerStore, the administrator still has the opportunity to save most of the information from it.
1. Ability to connect object storage
The main feature of Zextras PowerStore Luca Arcara considers the ability to hot connect object storage to the Zimbra infrastructure, which allows the administrator to almost instantly access all the benefits of using both cloud storage and locally deployed services.
Given that many cloud providers today provide access to their storage on a subscription model, Zimbra administrators have endless opportunities for redundant and scaling their infrastructure, as well as implementing hardware redundancy for a very reasonable price.
In addition, the ability to store part of the data in the cloud or geographically remote storages allows you to speed up the recovery process of Zimbra in the event of any large-scale incidents, which significantly increases the security of using this solution in the enterprise.
Source: habr.com