Design for a largish Cyrus server

[Jure Pečar]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:22:37 -0600
Gary Mills <mills at cc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:

> I'd like to leave SMTP on the V480 and add a 2-node load-balancing
> cluster for IMAP.  Each of the two servers would be a Sun V440 with 4
> CPUs and 16 GB of memory.  They would run Solaris 10.  Sun's QFS would
> provide shared storage from an iSCSI SAN.  There would be 3 TB of
> storage on the SAN.  Daily backup and restore would be from snapshots
> on the storage device.  We'd use Legato Networker for longer-term
> backup and restore.

I doubt there's a real need for the additional CPUs. You mostly want two machines for redundancy. But I do see the need for all the additional IO you can get, especially when you move to the Tb sized spools.
I don't know much about Sun gear and QFS, but there's a mention on the qfs web site mentioning metadata separation ... that sounds like an interesting toy to play with on mail spools. Also, Solaris 10 gives you dtrace ... I'd love to poke a large live mail server with it :)

About iSCSI ... any expirience with it? I know throughput is good enough, but what about latencies? Are they comparable with local disks or fibrechannel?


Please post about your progress and if you expirience anything interesting.


-- 

Jure Pečar
http://jure.pecar.org