On 1 Aug 2006, at 05:08, Dennis McLeod wrote:
I'm curious what hardware you build on. Do you buy Dell, HP, build
your
own, or do something else?
I'd go with a Dell SC1425. Get them to put in 2 80Gb SATA drives and
buy an Adaptec RAID card so you can RAID1 them for a bit of data
security. Sure, you could build it cheaper if you really tried, but
is it worth it? They only cost ~£600 for what you'll need.
Where you'll really save money is by buying RAM from Crucial instead
of Dell. For what Dell charge for an extra 512Mb you can get 2Gb from
Crucial.
What level of hardware would you use for an email only server with
this
number of accounts?
SC1425, 512Mb RAM, 2 RAID1 80Gb SATA drives.
Actually, I use a Xen VM with 512Mb RAM sitting on top of an SC1425
with 2Gb RAM and 2 RAID1 SATA drives which uses a hub-and-spoke mail
delivery model to push mail to the servers which host the domains,
but the idea is the same :)
Xen allows me to have separate SMTP, MX, NS etc servers within one
physical host, each with a dedicated RAM allocation. Virtualisation
is a great word to chuck at management and if you do a little reading
you can get a CPU that'll let you run unmodified Windows VMs on top
of your Xen install which can be handy in a mixed environment.
What if you added print and file services?
Stick in a bit more RAM and a second processor and you'll be fine.
Ideally you want a second server for file services, and printers
which have their own network interface but money might not stretch
that far.
What do you use for backup?
A separate server with RAID5 and huge hard drives, only accessible
from a dedicated network -- not the same one that everyone else is
connected to! Because it'll only be accessed when the backups are
happening, these drives are bought for size rather than speed to save
money.
Use rsnapshot. It's easy to setup and only saves the change deltas so
takes up much less space.
Have you thought about completely outsourcing your mail system
instead of keeping it with the website provider? It's probably be
cheaper and easier in the long run.
Cheers,
Craig
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