Skip to main content
Version: 4.9

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) for Archiving

BlueMind has a centralized archiving system (HSM: Hierarchical Storage Management). Hierarchical storage allows you to specify different storage spaces, usually to have extra storage space with lesser performances (and at a lower cost).

BlueMind uses server-side archiving: this enables you to keep archives together on a single-server, unlike PST archives generated with Outlook which stay on users' machines and must be backed-up.

Hierarchical storage allows you to specify different storage spaces, usually to have extra storage space with lesser performances (and at a lower cost). BlueMind's hierarchical archiving system has the following characteristics:

  • routing rules between the various storage locations managed by the administrator (emails older than X days, email size, etc.)
  • archive access from BlueMind webmail and thick clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.).

Archiving thus becomes exclusively an operational feature: the system is fully automated and transparent to users, who have no visibility into which server is actually being used for their emails.

Implement a hierarchical storage policy​

To implement HSM, in the admin console:

  • Go to System Management > System Configuration > the Mail App tab
  • In the Archiving section, check the box and fill in:
    • Number of days before archiving: the number of days before a message is archived
    • Size of messages (MiB): threshold above which messages are archived automatically, without waiting for the number of days set The default value is 1Mb
info

The MiB (Mebibyte) is a multiple of a byte, not to be confused with the MB (megabyte): it equals 1,024 kebibytes, which equals 1,024 bytes.
Therefore, 9 MiB equal 9.43718 MB.

So 9 MiB is equivalent to 9.43718 MB (Mb)

The rules for routing emails between servers run every day at 4 a.m. GMT.

Setting up a hierarchical storage space​

The installation must be performed in the /var/spool/bm-hsm/cyrus-archives/ directory

Changes relative to BlueMind 3.5​

Hierarchical storage is completely transparent to users. Compared to version 3.5:

  • As we've said above, users are no longer able to archive messages manually, but also:
  • The HSM policy is the same for all domain users
  • There are no group or user-specific archiving quotas any more. There is just one quota, archived data is accounted for within this one quota in addition to other non-archived messages.
  • The scheduled jobs HSMJob and HSMIndexJob are therefore irrelevant and no longer exist.