hardware recommendations for MURDER?

[Andrew Morgan]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Vincent Fox wrote:

> So lt looks like we are migrating our University to a murder setup. We are
> about 50,000+ users, with currently a number of mailstores (UWash) and
> users directly addressing them.
>
> We are looking towards adding new hardware for an MUPDATE box and some
> frontends. Anyone have recommendations on these? Sparc/Solaris versus
> X86/Linux? single-CPU versus duals? storage?
>
> I poked around in the mailing lists, didn't find anything really current.
> And we all know how our users email usage has gone up in the last couple
> of years.

We are running a Cyrus murder with 2 frontends, 2 backends, and 1 mupdate 
master for approximately 30,000 users (although actual usage varies 
greatly).  The frontends and mupdate master are Dell 2850s with dual 3GHz 
Intel Xeons.  In general, the frontends and mupdate master are pretty 
bored.  You can view the performance graphs for these servers at:

   https://secure.onid.oregonstate.edu/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id=4

These servers have Dell's hardware mirroring for 2 internal drives, which 
seems to be more than sufficient.  I'm a big fan of dual-core and/or 
dual-cpu solutions regardless of the size of the server.  Usually the 
price difference is negligible.  Personally, I would buy the new low-power 
Intel Xeons or AMD Opterons if I were purchasing these servers today.

 	Andy