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Date:      Fri, 08 Oct 1999 10:52:16 +0100
From:      Alan Judge <Alan.Judge@indigo.ie>
To:        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: NetApp servers 
Message-ID:  <19991008095218.39CB514BFA@hub.freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from N  dated Thursday at 23:51.

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>>>>> N <niels@bakker.net> writes:

Niels> 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 ?

Niels> Very expensive, since all mail software needs to lock files
Niels> it's writing to.  NFS is stateless, a lock is state
Niels> information, so by design any implementation of such is already
Niels> a gross hack.

Locking over NFS is indeed a gross hack and I'd never touch it.  That
said, we run most of our business on Netapp filers with FreeBSD front
ends.  Not all email systems need locking.  We run qmail with Maildirs
for around 100K users and it works fine.  Standard out of the box
qmail works with deliveries to NFS.  Front end machines are cheap,
replicatable, and easily upgradable, and we can add more when we need
to.  With clustered NetApps (expensive, I admit), you can eliminate
most single points of failure; which is where the statelessness of NFS
wins hands down.

In terms of manpower to run, it's much better than our previous system
which did use big boxes and RAID.  Scaling is a big problem.  By using
multiple front end machines, all our customers still access
mail.indigo.ie pop.indigo.ie and so on.  Using local disk means you
need a system to map users to machines;  doable, but messy.
--
Alan


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