hardware sizing for a large mail installation?

[John Madden]

> I/O, I/O, I/O -- it's off to work we go!!
>
> mail systems need primarily disk bandwidth. Get a killer disk array
> (fibre-channel or SCSI) and that will keep you happy. The Xeon
> is nice, but it's disk bandwidth you *need*. I can recommend
> the StorageTek D-series disk systems, but a bit expensive.

Fibre channel might be a bit out of our budget, but I could probably get
my hands on a U320 JBOD on a U320/PCI-X RAID controller (RAID-10, probably
14 73GB or 146GB disks).  (I'm thinking the solution would probably end up
being all-Sun or all-Dell, for reasons beyond my control.)  What sort of
sustained I/O would you expect to see in this environment?  I expect I
could easily push a continuous 150MB/s through that setup.

John




-- 
John Madden
UNIX Systems Engineer
Ivy Tech State College
jmadden at ivytech.edu


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