Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 00:46:24 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Maximum recommended user limits on mail server Message-ID: <3E7FED30.3070709@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <003401c2f176$e8ca9260$aa8ffea9@abyss> References: <003401c2f176$e8ca9260$aa8ffea9@abyss>
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Troy Settle wrote: > Well said Chuck, but I don't know if I agree with the 50 hour vs. 50 > minute argument. Anyone who has 2 days of downtime per year needs to > find a new line of work. After the past year or so, I'd be tempted to agree with you. :-/ > I won't argue, however, that downtime on a properly configured Sun > would be a fraction of a properly configured i386 box (I'm not too > familiar with sun, but isn't there a model with hot-swap everything, > including processor modules?). Most of Sun's lineup above the entry-class servers support hot-swap everything, yes: things like an E4500. The 3-digit Sun boxes like the E250, 280, 450, 480, etc are hot-swap disk only, not CPU or memory. > My current storage solution (FreeBSD 4-STABLE on a Celeron 600, 512MB, > RAID5 [amr 466, 16MB, LVD, 40Mbit/s, SCA]) has seen less than 5 hours of > downtime in the last 30 months. My SMTP/AV host has seen less than 2 > hours of downtime in the last 18 months. Nearly all of that downtime > was planned, and occurred in the wee hours of the morning. Sounds good to me. It's not that I believe that decent Intel hardware is particularly unreliable, but faults tend to be more serious (if only due to less redundancy and ECC thru various datapaths than in Sun's hardware). OpenFirmware's a plus, too...not that I need to advocate OF around people using a platform with FICL. > Personally, I can't see needing a Sun for quite some time. I know that > my current solution would handle at least 20k accounts without much > issue at all. The only concern I currently have, is that the hardware > is coming up on 3 years old and should probably be replaced sooner than > later. That may be the biggest difference right there, although the presence of SCSI adds significant longevity to the lifespan of an x86 server. Still, getting replacement parts (ie, hard drives with identical cylinder layouts to your original drives) after 3 or 5 years becomes a concern that a Sun box wouldn't have. That's one reason to pay the 3:1 or so markup for Sun-branded versus OEM drives. Another is that you're getting drives that test well-- for example, below-average spindle motor current required to maintain speed (indicating a slightly better bearing). Same effect as distributing resistors by quality into groups +/- 5%, +/- 10%, and +/- 20% tolerance. -Chuck To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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