New user - Question on storage strategy for CentOS 8

Support Install / Uninstall
1

Hi there. I’m considering moving our mail server to Axigen and encouraged by the true Linux support for it here. We have a small cluster of colocated servers that we manage for our businesses. There is a FreeNAS server there that has plenty of storage, and is HA to a snapshot 2nd FreeNAS server. I’d like to use it for our email storage, but not for the app or local storage.

In other words, I’d like to install Axigen on CentOS 8 on a virtual server and run it from there, but that its mail storage is on a NFS mounted directory to the SAN. What are the pitfalls with this? Since it is a more common storage strategy for enterprise installations, I’m assuming that others are doing something like this, but when I read the installation recommendations it is really just talking about HDD or SDD local storage and due to the sheer size of the mail storage, and difficulty to backup/restore large VMs for this, I’d prefer not to go that route.

All suggestions & feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Myles

2

Hi Myles,

Axigen definitely supports using a SAN, it’s even mentioned in their documentation:


It even allows hot spares sitting around if you really need high availiability.

While we’re not using a SAN for our email storage, we have separated out our message storage from the domain and object storage (the 3 storages that Axigen uses), as we have them located on different sets of disks.

You can even define different storage locations for each storage as granular as each domain!

The only consideration I would make would be speed, as SANs do add overhead, but that’s easily tested to make sure it still meets your parameters.

Cheers,
Brad

3

Thanks for the feedback. Really helps a lot. So far the performance I’m seeing (using a basic NFS mount to a FreeNAS server) is more than acceptable. I think this will scale and work very well for us.

Regards,
Myles