Patrick Lauer wrote:
Talking about storage, I'll use SCSI drives and a RAID1 hardware
controller.
Nonsense ;-)
Linux software raid is as fast and easier to manage. Also SCSI is
expensive - for the price of two scsi disks and a controller I can get
a 6-disk software RAID5 that will most likely outperform it and has
about 10x the space.
For most uses el cheapo SATA will be better (but SCSI / SAS /
FibreChannel has its place)
An onboard RAID card has the advantage of local cache (assuming yours
comes with some) which really really helps make all those 10-15k writes
when shuffling mail around your through your MTA's internal queues.
Using qmail about three years ago I was able to move about 2 million
unique emails a day on a single machine. Without the RAID card it
dropped down to just under 1 million. That's an extreme case since we
weren't doing much processing on the email so the top speed was limited
only by I/O.
I agree that 4-6 drives of SATA is a better way to go over SCSI
especially with users under 1000. RAID 5/6 (software or hardware as your
budget decides) and worry less about your data. Also find our what they
were paying for mail so you can use 12-18 months as your budget.
The big problems is nailing the requirements for this down.
virus and spam checking?
what attachments can you deny?
calender?
global address book?
imap? pop? smtp-auth?
web mail?
How big is the average mail box?
Can you set soft quotas?
and so on.
Specing hardware is likely to be the easiest part once you know what you
are actually going to build. :-)
Assuming you do everything in house I'd lean toward Openldap as the
backend for mail which should work nicely with Samba as an NT4 pdc so
you could have global logins for everyone with some planning.
kashani
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