What are you doing for Zimbra storage?

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

Hi folks,
  This list is now up to 60 members representing nearly 40 sites. Some are merely interested in Zimbra, while others have it running in full production. We're somewhere in the middle - we have a pilot deployment now with a few hundred users, but have just completed purchase of a site license and are looking to ramp up our system.

It looks like our biggest challenge is going to be balancing storage requirements vs cost and performance. Big fast Intel servers are now cheap, but big fast storage isn't. 

We're a Solaris shop, but have been forced to run Red Hat Linux to host Zimbra. We also make heavy use of NFS for our other systems, but Zimbra doesn't support NFS. All of this leaves us having to run a lot of technology that we're not overly comfortable with. 

We've chosen to make use of our NetApp storage as much as possible, and will be deploying onto a pair of FAS3040 heads (shared with other things as well) using iSCSI. Our NetApps are all loaded with SATA shelves, which has us concerned about performance bottlenecks (they're already showing up). We went with the ext3 filesystem on the Linux side because that's the default and is what Zimbra recommends. But in just 6 weeks, we've already had our first case of filesystem corruption which took 2 hours to fix with fsck (and that's with 30gb of data. What happens when we're at 5TB?). So now we're investigating Veritas File System, which we already use heavily on our Solaris ERP database servers and are very happy with. 

As you can see, we're barely into our pilot and are already having storage related issues. We know this'll be a learning exercise as we balance the performance that Zimbra demands with what we can actually afford, but it would be great to hear what other sites are doing - especially the larger ones. Some of you have already summarized your config and its in the list archives, but for those people newer to the list, perhaps you'd like to share how you've architected your environment and how well it's performing.

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