Shifting one well-known theorem into the modern mode, we can safely say that an abstract user, striking randomly on the keys of his PC for an unlimited time, will sooner or later print War and Peace. And if it seems to someone a grotesque exaggeration, then for most IT managers this situation is a normal state of affairs, except that instead of an abstract user, they have several hundred very specific employees who during the whole working day knock on the keys , communicating with customers, counterparties and, of course, with each other. There is nothing surprising in the fact that during the day each of these employees generates a text amount comparable to the third volume of the already mentioned War and Peace novel, and the volume of postal correspondence per month is calculated in dozens of gigabytes.
All this would look like another funny fact from the life of office workers, if it were not for one “but” - the business requires the IT manager not only to keep constantly, but also to reserve all generated correspondence, the archive with which after several years of work of the enterprise grows to incredible size and requires the acquisition of expensive storage systems as for the archive itself, and for its backup. But, as is often the case, management is in no hurry to allocate funds for the purchase of advanced storage systems and the IT manager has to go for various tricks to complete the task with available funds. Particularly acute is the issue of reducing mail archive and backup volumes facing those who rent storage, that is, in fact, it pays for the size of its back-up, for them compression allows you to achieve direct budget savings.
The open-source version of Zimbra Collaboration Suite allows you to reduce the amount of storage used by the backup using data archiving algorithms. Zimbra OSE users cannot reduce the size of the mail archive from which backups are taken. Such a possibility is most in demand among large enterprises, because it is there that archives with postal correspondence can reach an incredible size, at which the removal of backup copies and their restoration can last for several days. That is why the introduction of such a compression system is optional and becomes possible through the purchase and installation of a special extension - the ZxPowerstore zimlet, which is part of the ZeXtras Suite.
Zimlet adds deduplication algorithms to Zimbra - removing duplicate elements using the transparent item referencing method. In other words, if the managers of the conditional company arrange a mass mailing of the same presentations to a thousand clients, then a thousand files attached to the letters will not be stored on its server. Thanks to deduplication algorithms, only one copy of this file will be stored on the server, and once the letters are loaded, the element that was once saved will be loaded. And if this particular case is presented on an industrial scale, it turns out that due to this algorithm, the space occupied by the mail archive can be significantly reduced. And when it comes to terabytes of data, it saves a lot of money on data storage systems and a huge amount of time on reserving and deploying a mail archive in the future. It is also interesting that to initiate the deduplication algorithm, it’s enough to press just one button in the Zimbra administrator console.
The deduplication algorithm can also be run on the Zextras command line. To do this, enter the command “zxsuite powerstore doDeduplicate” and specify the name of the storage. After the algorithm scans the storage, it will issue a report in which it will directly indicate how much disk space it eventually managed to free. You can also configure the ZxPowerstore zemlet in such a way that deduplication will occur in automatic mode with a certain periodicity. The algorithm also has the ability to ignore data that has already been deduplicated and work only with those files that appeared since the last launch. In cases where the archive volume is calculated in terabytes, this approach saves a tremendous amount of time.
The results of the implementation of ZxPowerstore SaaS-provider show that the compression and deduplication of data when working with e-mail can significantly reduce the cost of ownership of the infrastructure and in some cases even increase the profitability of the business.