About This Technical Note

The Messaging Server message store contains the user mailboxes for a particular Messaging Server instance. The size of the message store increases as the number of mailboxes, folders, and log files increase.

As you add more users to your system, your disk storage requirements increase. Depending on the number of users your server supports, the message store might require one physical disk or multiple physical disks. Messaging Server enables you an add more stores as needed.

One approach to adding more stores is by using storage appliances. NetApp storage appliances called filers integrate seamlessly with Messaging Server in the message delivery environment. Filers are reliable and provide excellent performance, scalability, and data availability. Filers provide high-performance access to a single copy of the data, which is shared across all types of UNIX®clients through NFS.

The high-level steps to configure the NetApp filer for Messaging Server are:

1. Planning disk capacity

2. Creating volumes

3. Configuring Messaging Server to access the NetApp filer

In addition, you can use Snapshot^TMto create periodic copies for data protection in the event of server failure or loss of data. You can use SnapRestore® to quickly restore mailboxes from the snapshots taken previously. You can dump the Snapshot copies to tape library using NDMP and store them offsite. For more streamlined disaster recovery (DR) purposes, you can send these Snapshot copies by using SnapMirror® to a NetApp NearStore® system located at a secondary site or data center.