On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 06:12:47PM -0500, Charles Sprickman wrote: > Those things are tempting. I've always been a little put off by two > things - the size of the filer box itself and the fact that without full > NetApp support, which is probably insanely expensive, you have that box as > a big single point of failure. Have you seen the failover in action?
I have, and it works well. At one site there was an environmental problem which caused power supplies to go pop (on servers in general, not just Netapps). We got through several power supplies, but the filer headends took over the other set of disks quite happily. > http://www.unioncomputer.com/ > > The older models are pretty cheap, so I'm thinking that aside from the > space they take up, two filers might actually be affordable for the > small ISP/hoster. You might want to see if you can get support on them first, although if they're cheap maybe you just buy a spare headend and disk shelf for spares. Being able to get software upgrades could be useful too. I know that recently they added some cool features, like dual parity (lose any *two* disks from a RAID set, and still lose no data) I know a competitor came into the marketplace a couple of years ago - BlueArc? I never investigated them much. I think they claimed much higher performance due to custom silicon. But in mail applications, the disk spindles often becomes the bottleneck before the CPU does. That means you may end up sticking more disk shelves on, not because you need the capacity, but because you need the I/O bandwidth. That's something that appeals about the FAS270 approach though - even though the CPU is less beefy than the top-of-the-range models, as you add more disk shelves, you also add more CPU. Regards, Brian. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Courier-imap mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-imap
