Re: Scheduled Archive or Deletion of Email

[Robert Minvielle <rjm9466@louisiana.edu>]

I built two of those (not for mail, and I suppose you would call it version 1.0,
which held about 60TB of storage each)... 

A word of caution, unless you can not swing it, pay full price and buy the power
supplies that they use. We wired our own, which added a lot of time and pain onto
the project. No matter what, buy the chassis and backplanes they offer (or have links to). 

All in all it was an interesting project that gave us 120TB for about $8000 (this was
a few years back). On a funny (?) note, the dealer with the best price on drives sent
every one of them in a small factory cardboard box. I think I spent two hours unpacking
drives, then cutting up boxes to put in the recycle bin. 

OpenFlier vs Debian... not sure, personal choice I think. The RAID of RAIDs was ok,
but I think with todays cpus it would perform much better than it did when we built
ours. I would get as much cpu power and ram as possible, as building and repairing
120TB raid arrays with no hardware raid can be time consuming. Not sure if it would
be quick enough for /opt/zimbra/store, but it would easily do HSM. I think backblaze
gets the speed by using a distributed filesystem across the servers themselves. 

Just my $0.02, delete if off topic. 


--
Robert Minvielle
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Systems Administrator, University Computer Support Services

----- Original Message -----
> Found this interesting storage option today. BackBlaze uses these.
> 165TB for under $8000 and I think I'd install OpenFiler on it instead
> of Debian as they do.
> 
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
> 
> Matt
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rich Graves" <rgraves@carleton.edu>
> To: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2011 7:40:42 PM
> Subject: RE: Scheduled Archive or Deletion of Email
> 
> Tony, as of ZCS 7, you *can* skip backups of HSM.
> 
> Having no backups of anything older than 15 days would be very bad,
> but for an IL state .edu feeling the squeeze, it's not the worst
> option. They could run special HSM backups quarterly, perhaps.
> 
> I think the cheapest possible storage is a commodity desktop with a
> mirrored pair of 2TB drives and iSCSI target software such as
> OpenFiler or FreeNAS.
> 
> If you already have FC expertise in house, a higher performing, lower
> TCO option is a couple of 2-3 year old shelves of hard drives, pulled
> from someone else's old SAN and sold on eBay. Look for Xiotech;
> they're all obsolete. Dual-ported 2gb FC should be fine for HSM. Use
> Linux software RAID.
> 
> If you must buy new, Dell introduced some high-capacity SAS-to-(FC or
> iSCSI) units a couple months ago (3220F maybe?). Nexsan is the
> Cadillac of low cost, high performance, low-watt, extremely
> high-density storage. Infortrend is the Pinto of same. There's lots
> more small and white-box vendors that pack a lot of hard drives into
> 4U and let you plug iSCSI or FC into the other end, but they tend not
> to have the Nexsan/Dell level of expertise necessary to handle
> vibration dampening, power & cooling, etc.