Zimbra – Backup & Recovery

Over the past several months, I have been working with various NetApp employees and contractors to develop what we believe is a first for Zimbra; application-consistent backup & recovery. For NetApp and its customers backup & recovery is always very important and now you have one more reason to trust NetApp for your Zimbra workloads.

It’s an interesting coincidence that my first exposure to NetApp and Zimbra came at about the same time, as the company I worked at in Tokyo decided to purchase a FAS3040 filer for both e-mail and shared file storage. One of my first tasks in that implementation was to set-up iSCSI LUNs for the Zimbra installation to use. With the help of a contractor, we implemented Zimbra on those backend LUNs and everything worked quite well. The one thing that I always would have liked would have been automated and space-efficient backups, but alas I had to script the backups from scratch much like we did with many of our plethora of open source applications.

Well, the day has come when we no longer need to consume valuable shared storage space or develop scripts from scratch. Leveraging NetApp Snap Creator, along with our upcoming Zimbra plug-in you can now perform full and incremental backups of multi-node Zimbra environments via NetApp snapshots and all of the benefits that go along with those. These will, of course, require no dowtime to the Zimbra application and will be application, not just crash consistent! In addition, given the similarities between Zimbra and Octopus, this plugin will allow backup and restore of VMware Octopus as well, another first!

We have recently completed the initial testing and are about to go BETA with this plug-in. This, along with other Snap Creator related demos and labs, will be a highlight of our content at VMworld this year. I for one am very excited to see the dream of application-consistent Zimbra backups come true and very much looking forward to showing customers, partners and others what’s possible with Zimbra and NetApp Snap Creator.

Thanks as always for reading. I’m looking forward to seeing you all very soon!