Hi

Hello,

with my question I wanted to find out whether SM is now also going its own way into the cloud or whether this is a useful OnPrem extension.

After 25 years, I have become very cautious when a software provider goes down the path of offering its software itself as a cloud solution. There are many negative examples of where this has led.

To avoid much speculation, I was hoping for a timely response from ST.

Regards

Oliver

I wrote it here because I thought it might interest others.

Hello Derek,

Thank you for your reply.

Now I'm reassured!

Best regards

Oliver

Hello,

This is a long-awaited configuration for us, using Smartermail in cluster mode just like postfix+dovecot works. Our only concern is a possible corruption of the .GRP files. Is there any safety mode to prevent this from happening?

Hi All

May I ask does this work like exchange on stand alone nodes with logging and syncing between nodes?

Or is there still a dependency on shared storage?

""Cheers

G

Nodes will be assigned a mount that they should use. Your nodes can have individual mounts along with the commands to mount and unmount the drive. SM will automatically perform these duties when it runs, or in the HA environment when we fail over, we will spin that machine down (if its running), and spin a backup server up with the same mount configuration (containing domain/user/logs, etc)
The only shared storage (that can have multiple reader/writers) will be the Hub servers that sit in front, those store some very basic cluster information that is synchronized (by your shared storage and our networking layer) with the other hubs. Should be plenty more information and guides coming soon.

From what I understand, this all seems to be based on a third-party shared storage.

The phrase "Nodes will be assigned a mount that they will use" from what I understand means that I need a mount point (I think a network) where the data will be stored, so I definitely call it shared storage.

It is not specified if the "mount" is an "external storage system" (from a third-party provider like a SMB share, a SAN or some other system) or if SmarterMail creates and manages one somehow on its own.

If not, can you explain how it would work otherwise?

Is there a sort of integrated distributed HA storage cluster system built in with data redundancy, synchronization (possibly real time) and data integrity checking of all user databases on different Smarter Mail SERVERS?

It's based on a filepath thats local to the machine and a command that gets run when we run and a command that gets run when we shut down, you would theoretically mount and unmount using whatever mechanism you wish. It's not shared in the essence that different SM's are accessing the same folder, this is not the case, each SM will have its own partition, filepath, mount, however you decide to set it up. I'll let our upcoming information explain HA setups in more detail.

(PS. Our recently added Volume Mounts feature is what this system I'm talking about is, available right now per-server, HA will utilize this system)

@Matt Thanks for the explanation.

The reason for my question is that shared storage like a San or Nas is an antiquated concept for HA and it has its own issues to deal with.

Not having a reliance on San or Nas as a shared storage medium is the preferred modern way (distributed file system/ replication) for improved uptime.

What I'm asking here is do we need to use shared storage like a San or Nas to achieve HA as this was the previous requirement?

Will the new HA also work with Linux as this is our prefered OS.

""Cheers

G