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Could the storage concept be enhanced?
Question asked by TK - 2/26/2022 at 1:08 AM
Unanswered
I've talked about this to support before and wanted to bring this to the community. Wil I understand Smartermail seems to heavily read and write to disks (as such requiring poentially high IOPS) storage is a cost factor and such adopting a more cloud style storage may be interesting for the future. If Smartermail could rely on object storage (e.g. s3, etc.) it could automatically solve a few problems (cost, scaling, migrations, backup, etc.). Back to the performance it may be possible to work with caching gateways if a direct integration is not possible. Maybe it could only be used for archiving mails (requiring a different performance tiert) Has anyone toyed with this idea in the past? Thoughts?

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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
I did some cursory research on using Amazon S3 as an example, and it does look like you can mount S3 buckets as a drive in Windows, so this is something that you could test with a clone of your existing environment. I found a write-up on extending those S3 buckets to Windows (and others) here: 


I also find some documentation on maximum speeds for S3 buckets and believe it should be pretty sufficient at least for small and medium size loads:


My biggest concern here would be throughput to the disk, as latency and disk queues can lead to SmarterMail handling user requests poorly as it waits for the drive to respond. All of this is to say it looks like it might be possible now, but I recommend testing it (with active user access if possible) extensively before rolling it out to production. I hope that helps!
Kyle Kerst System/Network Administrator SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Nathan McKAy Replied
If you try this, please let me know how it goes.
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Sabatino Replied
Allow me to make an observation

What I don't understand is why all archiving policies are the same.

I'll explain.

If it is true that sm must access the disk frequently and that IOPS must be adequate, I wonder if it is not the case to put the .json i.cfg i .stat4 in a disk with maximum performance and instead the .grp in a record with lower performance

it is true that I can admit a small delay in viewing emails
Sabatino Traini Chief Information Officer Genial s.r.l. Martinsicuro - Italy
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This is a good suggestion!
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

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