You will scale MUCH better by saving the cash from the quad processors
and buy 5 or more single CPU systems, and put them behind a cisco
localdirector or similar piece of equipment. Since your systems will
be 98.5% I/O driven, big systems are a waste of cash. You'll be spinning
your wheels with things such as memory contention, disk i/o, etc. A
cluster of cheaper systems will most always outperform a few larger
ones on any task.
Throwing money at a problem will never solve it.
- Franco
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 4:15 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Win2k - Imail - Redunancy
It seems to me your primary goal is to create a mail system that has no
single point of failure, and secondarily, to scale.
If so, then two dual/quad processor boxes in a Win2k Adv Cluster would
more than suffice. For ease of administration, I would recommend a
"raid box", but not necessarily a cheap one. To eliminate the single
point of failure, it would have to have dual hot-swappable power supplies,
and as Len rightly points out, hardware 0+1. I would use a RAID box, as
opposed
to local storage to eliminate problems of syncronization, and it's also
simpler to admin.
As for authentication, we're implementing a custom auth library that
interfaces directly into our Customer Mgt system, which solves the problem
of M$ licenses, as well as administration headaches.
My $.02
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Len Conrad
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 11:46 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Win2k - Imail - Redunancy
>Let me ask this Len, I want to use IMail (mainly for the web
>message). But I am fearful of hard drive crashing and loosing the
messages.
Then use RAID 1, mirroring, and mirror in hardware, not the OS.
That's an easy solution.
>I wanted to use win2k for the clustering feature to cluster 3
>servers having access to the data drive via SCSI-II adapters. The
>other thing is that I would want to authenticate via NT rather than
>internal Imail database;
You're sure about that??
>since all three servers are members of the same domain - so it does
>not matter which server they connect to.
So you use the domain feature to get "roaming" between the 3 boxes,
ok. But do you know you're "supposed" to buy a CAL for every NT
auntenticated user, I think? What's 40K or 200K CAL's cost?
>The Raidbox is storing the Imail directory and websites.
Mailbox users contending with web visitors for single disk channel
access. It'll work if there are few of either group.
Three clustered servers is a lot of firepower for mail, even web
mail. Do you have 200K users? What's your msg traffic in number and
volume?
Len
http://BIND8NT.MEIway.com : Binary for ISC BIND 8.2.3 T9B for NT4 & W2K
http://IMGate.MEIway.com : Build free, hi-perf, anti-spam mail gateways
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