PS while I was writing this, the last messages came in from Rich Rob and Steve. It is fascinating to see what other sites are doing.
Definitely, making a single mail server more bulletproof is a compromise option, and definitely it all depends on budget. I wouldn't want to set any mail server up without some sort of RAID. I have mixed feelings about NetApp's, though. They are kinda pricey. And, you end up with all your eggs in one basket . I once presided over a spectacular late-night NetApp failure at Genuity that literally paralyzed half our company, an episode that ended with my having to flash some beta version of the OS onto the thing in between crashes at midnight, replacing some other beta version of the OS that we had put on to solve some other crash problem...it was NOT pretty. (Don't ask why we were set up this way, let's just say Politics won. We knew better.) Anyway, my deepest instinct is to never have just one of *anything* if I can help it, no matter how powerful and stable that thing is. (The NetApp bug involved CIFS access to directories that were mounted on a unix-mode filer. Something was causing word-boundary violations. So the system would crash, the NT connections would time out, the system would come up, the NT systems would reconnect.... lather, rinse, repeat....the bloody thing was on at least eight physical networks and I don't know how many VLANS, all with late-night NT users....) But anyway, this is all "what-if". It's really interesting to know what's *possible* for email even if we don't get to build it all. This originally came up when I was having lunch with a hiring manager and over coffee she started going into her "what-if" list. I don't think I'd have to build it in the first week or anything. She had some interesting what-if's, another involving VMWARE and VPN's that I may bring up here another time.... --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
