Main Benefits of Zextras PowerStore

Zextras PowerStore is one of the most sought-after add-ons for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, included in the Zextras Suite. Using this extension, which allows you to add hierarchical media management to Zimbra, as well as seriously reduce hard disk space occupied by users ’mailboxes by using compression and deduplication algorithms, ultimately leads to a serious decrease in the cost of ownership of the entire Zimbra infrastructure. And when Zextras PowerStore is used in the conditions of SaaS providers, we can talk about huge savings. But these are not all the possibilities that this extension can offer to the Zimbra administrator. In order to find out what Zextras PowerStore can offer to the Zimbra administrator, we turned to Luca Arcara , a senior solution consultant at Zextras, who is actively involved in the development of Zextras Suite. He told us four key features of Zextras PowerStore that any Zimbra administrator would like.



4. Ability to configure media after installing Zimbra
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In the last article, we talked about how you can optimize Zimbra's mail storages so that they can demonstrate the highest possible performance. Apart from the fact that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition administrator needs to determine the size of mail storages at the infrastructure design stage, one of the recommendations was to carefully consider the number of bytes for inode that are generated on mke2fs hard disks and the -i parameter when creating on them file system.

However, in order to accurately determine the average size of messages at the design stage, the system administrator needs to have the gift of clairvoyance. Of course, only a handful of them have such a gift, and such parameters as the average message volume and size of the drive are still better solved, having on hand the statistics of Zimbra work in “combat” conditions.

And here the Zextras PowerStore extension comes to the aid of the Zimbra administrator, which, thanks to the possibility of using Hierarchical Media Management, allows you to connect an additional drive and thereby postpone making decisions about the average message size and storage media volumes until full statistics appear.

3. Avoid using LVM

Although the logical volume manager is a great solution, which, at first glance, is great for Zimbra mail storage, due to the possibility of expanding and removing snapshots, it still has a lot of drawbacks. The key ones are the complicated volume management compared to conventional disks, as well as the 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, eliminates the use of LVM and allows the expansion of 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 resilient.

2. The ability to transfer data to other volumes and drives

It is always better to prevent any problem than to eliminate its consequences. This rule is quite true for such a situation as the failure of the hard drive and its attendant complete or partial loss of data. Planned replacement of storage media is a fairly common practice among SaaS providers, who find it easier to plan a preventive pause and warn customers in advance rather than incur losses and spoil their image because of a hard disk that did not fail.

It would seem that it could be easier than transferring data from one hard drive to another? Under normal conditions, 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 to the new disk all the settings of the old file system and prevent you from changing 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 with its planned replacement are best done using Zextras PowerStore. Thanks to its use, the Zimbra administrator is able to transfer only the most important to the new disk - mailboxes and their contents, while gaining the freedom to set up a file system on it.

Also, in any high-loaded infrastructure, be it a large enterprise or a SaaS provider, there are also such mailboxes, access to which must be permanent. This applies to top managers' mailboxes, customer contact mailboxes, and so on. When using the stock version, transferring a separate mailbox from the storage, which is closed for maintenance, to the server that continues to work, is impossible. You can also avoid downtime during the maintenance of the mail storage on which such mailboxes are located, you can also use the Zextras PowerStore extension, which allows you to transfer individual mailboxes between mailboxes located in the same Zimbra infrastructure. Thus, Zextras PowerStore can help the Zimbra administrator to increase security, as well as significantly reduce downtime when performing manipulations with hard drives.

In addition, Zextras PowerStore can help in rescuing data from a partially damaged disk. The developers have provided the ability to ignore read errors when transferring mailboxes, so in some situations when the data carrier has already started to be covered with bad blocks, thanks to the PowerStore, the administrator still has the opportunity to save most of the information from it.

1. The ability to connect object storage

The main chip of Zextras PowerStore Luca Arcara considers the possibility of hot connection to the Zimbra infrastructure of object storage, which allows the administrator to almost instantly get access to all the benefits of using both cloud storage and locally deployed services.

Considering the fact that many cloud providers today provide access to their repositories using a subscription model, Zimbra administrators have endless opportunities to back up and scale their infrastructure, as well as implement hardware redundancy for very reasonable money.

In addition, the ability to store some data in the cloud or geographically remote repositories allows you to speed up the recovery process of Zimbra in the event of any major incidents, which greatly increases the security of using this solution in the enterprise.