Re: Zimbra Backup Strategies

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

----- "Tim Ross" <tross@calpoly.edu> wrote:

> With our current setup,
> the fastest transfer rate we could get would be approximately 2
> Gigabit/sec from our Zimbra servers to the SAN storage.  We are
> thinking that we would probably do a full backup once a week with
> incrementals for the rest of the week.
> 
> What backup strategies/hardware are others on this list using?

We're just in early pilot right now, so backups are still small and easily manageable. I'm not thrilled with the idea of having to have 'disk x 2' just to hold a backup image that we then spool to tape, but it appears to be all we can do for now. So what we've done to start with is use an iSCSI mount to a Sun Thumper for the backup area. We had originally hoped to put our main message store on Thumpers as well, but that's proving problematic due to reliability issues with the Thumpers and the bleeding edge Solaris version we have to run to get iSCSI.

So we've roughly broken it down like this (or will, once we're done)

- /opt/zimbra -- iSCSI mount to NetApp
- /zimbradata/volume0 -- first volume for msg/index storage, also iSCSI to NetApp
- /zimbradata/backup -- iSCSI mount to Sun Thumper
- /zimbradata/hsm0 -- not set up yet, but iSCSI mount to Thumper where msgs older than 30 days will migrate to
- /opt/zimbra/redolog -- to do, move this to a separate iSCSI mount on a different NetApp

Right now, a NetBackup client on the Zimbra servers backs up all of these volumes to tape over the net.

Is anyone actively using HSM? If so, what are you HSM'ing to? I assume the HSM process runs overnight - how long does it typically take? How much data lives on HSM vs primary storage?


-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University
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