Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:51:14 +0200 (CEST)
From:      N <niels@bakker.net>
To:        Damian Hamill <mambo@themail.co.uk>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: NetApp servers
Message-ID:  <9910072340520.6647-100000@liquid.tpb.net>
In-Reply-To: <37FA8675.E0B2877A@themail.co.uk>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?9910072340520.6647-100000>