Opera Software Australia Pty Ltd

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We know that storage and service reliability is important to our users. Ensuring that stored emails and files are always available and are never lost, damaged or corrupted is always one of our primary concerns. Compare all the systems and precautions we take below to your current provider or in house solution and see if you can afford not to change. We use a number of systems to ensure the reliable storage of all email on our servers. -Servers Reliability starts with the hardware we choose. To ensure that all IMAP/POP email servers stay up and running continuously and reliably we use IBM servers. All servers have 24x7 support contracts with 4 hour response times from an IBM technician. All servers are dual power supply and connected to separate power circuits. All circuits are monitored to ensure there's no over use that might trip a circuit breaker. -RAID RAID storage is the first level of redundancy. RAID ensures that any single disk failures in any of our systems has no effect on any running services. Basically a disk can fail, and the system keeps running fine. When a drive does fail, we're alerted and because we use hot-swap systems, we can immediately replace the failed disk and the system can immediately rebuild the redundant data again. We use high quality SATA-to-SCSI RAID storage units (based on high performance ARECA controllers with battery backup non-volatile RAM caching). Additional spare units and drives on hand in case of any failures. As with the servers, they're all dual power supply and connected to separate monitored power circuits. -Replication RAID is a great first level, but it doesn't help if a server fails, or if there's some form of file system corruption. That's where replication comes in. When any action is performed on a mailbox (eg email delivered, email copied, email deleted, etc), that action is immediately replicated to a completely separate second server. So if any server fails, we can immediately switch over to the replica server and continue providing service. Most replication systems replicate at the disk block level. However this doesn't protect against operating system errors that introduce file system corruptions ( xfs example ). Our replication system replicates at the email level, it understands the structure of mailboxes and what's happening to emails. This allows it to be more efficient, and also it protects the replica side from any low level filesystem corruptions. -Backups On top of RAID and replication, we also maintain a completely separate backup system. The backup system runs nightly and takes an incremental backup of any new emails put in each mailbox over the last 24 hours. If any emails are deleted, it keeps a copy of the deleted email for 7 days. The backup system runs on completely separate servers (Sun x4500), with completely separate power circuits and separate RAID storage. The servers use a different operating system, have completely separate login credentials, and only access the main servers via a custom protocol that's designed just to feed incremental backup data to them.

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