Redundancy, backups, and/or Load balancing?

[Matt Goebel]

I'm looking for ideas on how to provide the greatest of piece of mind for
my current mail server setup.  Right now I have:

1 Mail server with redundant hardware (Raid 5, dual power, backup fans
etc.. everything except motherboard, memory, and CPU's) which runs all the
software for the mail system (Postfix, Cyrus-Imapd, etc....)

2 U320 DAS units each in Raid 5 (+1 hotspare.)  Both of these are
connected to the mail server (same controller) and I've got a software
Raid 1 going between them.  I keep all the mail on these (the whole of
/var actually).

1 Backup mail server that just stores and forwards email in the event the
mail server if offline.

Backups are handled by a rsync script which copies all the mail off the
DAS' onto the local disks.. which then gets backed up.

Any ideas on how to improve upon this setup?  The DAS units have a 2nd
controller on them so I was thinking switching to a shared filesystem
(Redhat Enterprise 4 has one) and getting a 2nd identical mail server that
either just sat there waiting for the first server to go down.. or
better.. did load balancing (nominal load now but since I have it there).

Backups I'm using LVM so snapshots might be an option.. although it's a
lot extra to be backing up.



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