From owner-freebsd-isp Fri Oct 8 2:52:20 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from relay04.indigo.ie (relay04.indigo.ie [194.125.133.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 39CB514BFA for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 02:52:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from judgea@indigo.ie) Received: (qmail 12831 messnum 46558 invoked from network[194.125.133.235/relay-mgr.indigo.ie]); 8 Oct 1999 09:52:16 -0000 Received: from relay-mgr.indigo.ie (HELO indigo.ie) (194.125.133.235) by relay04.indigo.ie (qp 12831) with SMTP; 8 Oct 1999 09:52:16 -0000 To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NetApp servers In-reply-to: Message from N dated Thursday at 23:51. From: Alan Judge Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1999 10:52:16 +0100 Message-Id: <19991008095218.39CB514BFA@hub.freebsd.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org >>>>> N 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message