Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 00:15:54 -0400 From: "Jerry Bell" <jerry@bellnetworks.net> To: "Michael Dungan" <mpd@bluetie.net>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: high volume mail server hardware suggestions Message-ID: <001b01bfa4fe$f6524b20$f7bbb1d0@netrex.com> References: <004b01bfa4c7$bd823ee0$c71930d0@hoorj>
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Whether to use a few 'large' servers or several smaller servers is partly related to the type of mail services and partly to the amount of money you are willing to spend. If you are looking at strickly SMTP services, you have a lot more flexibility, since each server can more or less run independantly of the others. Providing POP and IMAP services will tie the servers together, either through a shared mail spool or through aliases to directly a certain user's mail to a certain server. The shared mail spool concept is quite popular, but it provides a pretty big bottleneck to performance and a single point of failure. These issues can be mitigated through high speed, backend network access to the fileserver and using more robust hardware on the server. Providing SSL based POP and IMAP services add a significant CPU load that can be helped by adding more processors. You can probably save a bit of money by going the several smaller server route since each server doesn't need to handle too large of a load, and less robust hardware can be used since the loss of a server in this environment is more tolerable. Two single processor or two dual processor machines is capable of moving a lot more data than one dual processor or one quad processor machine. This model is also easy to upgrade - if designed properly, you can keep adding front end machines to load balance across. As far as hardware, I really like the Dell poweredge line. I'd recommend using the poweredge 2300's (may be 2400 by now :) for the smaller boxes - each are 2 processor capable and have a built in hardware raid array. For the larger box, possibly the backend file server, if you are going that route, I'd look at the poweredge 4400. As people have said before, RAM is very important, CPU is important if you have a lot of POP/IMAP/POP3S/IMAPS clients, hardware raid (perferably using 0+1 with fast disks) will also help. It's difficult to give the specifics of what is needed without knowing the kind of load, architecture of the servers to be used, budget and performace/reliability expectations there are. I hope this helps. Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Dungan <mpd@bluetie.net> To: <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 5:40 PM Subject: high volume mail server hardware suggestions > Does anyone have any suggestions for hardware for running high volume e-mail > servers with FreeBSD? Should I use a few "large" servers, or several smaller > ones? > > thanks, > > Mike > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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