On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Greg Cope wrote:
> Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Bill Carlson wrote:
>
> <interesting snippage>
>
> >
> > But this is a religious argument that has been hashed out repeatedly on
> > many mailing lists I've been on in past years. The RAID-1 crowd and the
> > RAID-5 crowd never gain converts as neither seems to be able to produce
> > controlled benchmarks convincing enough to sway the other. My suggestion
> > is to test, test, test under your environment or the best approximation
> > you can fabricate, and pick what works best for you.
>
> Out of interest, and not wishing to start another religious war, what
> would people use for simple out bound servers ?
If you can have multiple boxes (ie, you have the space and the expertise
to manage them) I think the best answer cost-wise is a bunch of cheap
boxes with mirrored IDE drives, preferable hardware-based mirroring. qmail
seems to hit limits in this order: Bandwidth, RAM, Disk I/O, CPU.
The one gotcha with qmail is the queue, if the file system that holds the
queue is lost or corrupted, you lose mail (assuming there is something in
the queue of course)..
> The need for a decent storage (speed / reliability) is obvious for a
> singular mail server. What about outbound only servers ?
>
> The reason I ask is that I am invloved with a few projects that send
> personalised emails (no not spam). Queue importance is not critical.
>
> We looked at the cost of hardware raid (0+1 or 5) and IDE vs SCSI.
>
> IN the end the simplest solution was multiple (and simple) IDE based
> servers - as going SCSI or RAID would only appear to offer parity in the
> cost vs performance ratio compared to IDE. This may be due to the UK
> having higher component and rack costs than the US, I am not sure.
I think you'd find the pricing is similiar in everywhere. I priced a
machine with 72GB of good, fast SCSI with RAID. The storage alone (discs,
enclosure, RAID controller) was over half the price of the machine
($6000-$10000). One could get 72GB of mirrored IDE storage for less than
$800 on a guess. Sure, the performance may not be the same when comparing
straight up, but the SCSI is almost 4-5 times the IDE price.
$.02
Bill Carlson
------------
Systems Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Opinions are mine,
Virtual Hospital http://www.vh.org/ | not my employer's.
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics |
