From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Oct 7 14:51:21 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from smtp1.xs4all.nl (smtp1.xs4all.nl [194.109.127.48]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 041541527A for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 14:51:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from niels@bakker.net) Received: from liquid.tpb.net (arctic.xs4all.nl [194.109.37.82]) by smtp1.xs4all.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA18290; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:51:15 +0200 (CEST) Received: from localhost (niels@localhost) by liquid.tpb.net (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id XAA06681; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:51:14 +0200 Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:51:14 +0200 (CEST) From: N X-Sender: niels@liquid.tpb.net To: Damian Hamill Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NetApp servers In-Reply-To: <37FA8675.E0B2877A@themail.co.uk> Message-ID: <9910072340520.6647-100000@liquid.tpb.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Damian Hamill wrote: > Can anyone put any figures on what it costs to install and run a large > scale email service (say > 10,000 users) using a NetApp file server, > i.e. what are the real costs in terms of all the hardware components > and also how many man hours per month to look after it etc. Any real > life examples out there ? Very expensive, since all mail software needs to lock files it's writing to. NFS is stateless, a lock is state information, so by design any implementation of such is already a gross hack. I suggest getting a RAID controller, preferably a SCSI-SCSI one. Cost is about a third of a NetApp. If you really want a purple box in your racks use them to store web pages or user home directories (i.e. stuff you need on several machines at the same time and that will hardly be written to). EarthLink do run mail on NetApps. They have a white paper somewhere on their website describing their setup (which involves some hacks in local delivery agents and POP3 daemons to work around the locking issue). -- Niels. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message