High availability email server...

[John Madden]

> The capability to handle small files efficiently is related to the 
> filesystem carrying the files and NOT to the physical and logical storage 
> media (block device) under it.

Not necessarily true.  All sorts of factors about the SAN, such as block
size, stripe size, RAID level(s), number of spindles in extents, extent
spanning, multipathing per i/o, and probably a dozen other factors can
affect how well a particular SAN or SAN configuration handle small or
large files.

...Take it from a guy running a Cyrus install of 12 million tiny files
who is very unhappy with how his (current) SAN performs for such an
application.

(And yes, of course, filesystem issues affect performance as well.)

John




-- 
John Madden
Sr. UNIX Systems Engineer
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
jmadden at ivytech.edu