Nicholas Harring wrote:
Hi,
when going the "Maildir on NFS for clustering"-route, is using NetApp
Filers still considered "state of the art" or has something better
emerged?
There are plenty of other NAS options, see EMC for one vendor (also not
cheap). Dell offers NAS, HP I believe does as well. Not sure how much
clustering they offer, and what sort of feature set it has compared to
NetApp.
These are all basically W2K3-servers ("Windows Storage Server")
(EMC uses Windows even in the high-end gear, IIRC, but not necessarily WSS).
I'm not going to gamble with the NFS-performance and the compatibility
issues of "Microsoft-flavoured NFS".
From a price-point, I'd rather use FreeBSD, but the fact that there's
no real volume-manager makes it unusable for our purposes.
I've actually mailed Blue Arc about their hardware, but despite not
being in the black, they didn't feel it necessary to answer my query.
For a smaller cluster or one that doesn't have hard uptime commitments
in the 4 or 5 9s range I'd say that a *nix solution would work just
fine. If you laid something like Veritas Clustering on top of it then
moving into the "real" HA range should also be quite possible and
supportable.
I've also thought about buying an X4100 and fitting it with a Dual QLA,
then exporting the mailstorage via NFS from that (using our HP SAN as
backend).
But using a NetApp would allow have our hosting-operations being spread
over two completely independent technologies (Web-> HP EVA,
Mail->NetApp), avoiding a complete loss of service should one of the two
fail for whatever reason (like a competitor, who put all eggs in a
single basket recently learned the hard way...).
Does anybody have any sizing-information? NetApp offers a lot of
hardware and even the entry-level stuff is not cheap.
I'd like to know how many deliveries/h one can make e.g. with a small
FAS 270.
I'm running 8 servers (4 smtp, 4 pop/imap) on an F820c cluster doing
around 600k messages daily. I don't have any hourly stats at the moment,
but that load is spread with about 80% across 10-12 hours with the
remainder spread evenly across the other 12-14. I'm currently upgrading
my cluster to FAS3050s but not due to performance reasons, but rather
storage consolidation throughout my network.
600k deliveries/day?
How much room is there 'till the NetApp is maxed out?
...
Hope that helps,
Nick
Yeah, it does.
Thanks a lot.
Rainer
