From owner-freebsd-isp Sun Mar 23 11:17:18 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 23C5637B404 for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2003 11:17:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from pop018.verizon.net (pop018pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.212]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 011BD43F85 for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2003 11:17:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([129.44.43.88]) by pop018.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.27 201-253-122-126-127-20021220) with ESMTP id <20030323191715.OBCW6884.pop018.verizon.net@mac.com> for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:17:15 -0600 Message-ID: <3E7E0837.1080408@mac.com> Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 14:17:11 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Maximum recommended user limits on mail server References: In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 0.73.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at pop018.verizon.net from [129.44.43.88] at Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:17:15 -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Tom Samplonius wrote: > On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Bill Vermillion wrote: [ ... ] >> He's thinking he needs to go with 'big iron' such as SUN. > Well, if he wants to waste money.... 10 to 15K accounts is not a lot > accounts. Plus, "Sun big iron" comes with such slow processors. For > instance, the 2.4Ghz Xeon is going to be faster than any single Sun > processor. You'll need a quad Ultrasparc to keep up with a basic dual > Xeon (like Dell Poweredge 2650). # of disk spindles and the I/O system matter a lot more than CPU power does for the user aspects of what mail servers do; ie, the box(es) with filestorage holding user's mailboxes, the place which runs your IMAP/POP services, etc. You'd want CPU power more for virus scanning and spam-testing; a Dell PE would do just fine as the SMTP relay box, which processes all mail in and out of the mbox-storage/MUA system(s). A Sun E450 with twenty disks across five SCSI channels (66MHz/64bit PCI) can make the difference between fifty hours of downtime per year with Intel gear versus 50 minutes with the Sun. If ~50 hours of downtime per year costs more than $30K, getting the Sun is probably worth it. That's not to say that Sun is the only solution, but you do want something which can handle up to 1.6+ Gbs of disk bandwidth plus however much for network traffic as well. If this mail server is local to a company's office, and they're doing multimedia, you might need more than 100Mbs ethernet. An E450, or maybe a 280R + a D1000 storage setup would fit the bill nicely. Or perhaps a Apple Xserve plus their new fibre RAID storage box? :-) I'd wait for SATA drives, MB's, and such to evolve for another generation and see how they're doing then, before I'd switch from SCA-2 [80-pin hot-pluggable SCSI-3 format] as a preferred format. And you should be looking to do RAID-1,0 (or -10, or -0+1), not RAID-5. And you should be looking for disks that have at least a 3-year warrantee. -- -Chuck To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message