Zimbra Backup Strategies

["Tim Ross" <tross@calpoly.edu>]

Hi-

Here at Cal Poly, we just signed the contract with Zimbra and are in the planning stages.  We will have approximately 30,000 accounts with an estimated storage of 8-10 TB of storage.  One of our big concerns is if we will be able to back up all this data to SAN storage and then to tape for offsite storage on a weekly basis.  I have not been involved too deeply in the backups for our previous system (Oracle Collaboration Suite), so I may not get all the terminology correct.  The biggest problem we see with the Zimbra backup is that the database is stored as thousands of small files, which take much longer to move than one or several zipped or tarred files.  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?

---
Tim Ross
Application Administrator
Collaboration Support
Cal Poly State University
756-6226