hardware recommendations for MURDER?

[Michael Loftis]

--On July 20, 2006 2:41:26 PM -0500 Phil Brutsche <phil at optimumdata.com> 
wrote:

> 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.
>
> For the servers themselves I would go Linux on x86 using the hardware
> vendor of your choice.  The back-ends would probably be better off with
> dual CPUs, but keep in mind that those will be *dual-core* dual-CPU
> systems.  Go with an AMD Opteron or Intel 5100-series Xeon if you can,
> they'll give you better performance than the older stuff.
>
> It goes without saying that the disks should be SCSI/SAS, but the
> direct-attached SCSI vs SAN debate depends on how much ucdavis is
> willing to spend.
>
> IMO if you go with an iSCSI SAN you should definitely get a second
> physical CPU in each backend - without an iSCSI accelerator card like
> the Adaptec 7211C it's a CPU hog if you have heavy I/O, and accelerator
> cards that work outside of Windows are pretty rare.
>
> I don't imagine the front-ends would do a whole lot of heavy lifting, so
> a single CPU will be fine, but a dual-core CPU would be great if you're
> going to enable SSL.

Depends on how you handle incoming mail....For us incoming mail gets a lot 
of Virus and SPAM checking done to it, and our incoming servers (right now) 
are shared with the frontends, so that uses quite a bit of CPU.

>
> OS-wise I would go with RedHat Enterprise or Novell's SuSE Enterprise,
> but if you are more of a *BSD guy that will work as well.
>
> --
>
> Phil Brutsche
> phil at optimumdata.com
> ----
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