Hardware opinion sought - Sun X4500

[Tom Samplonius]

----- "Qin Li" <Q.Li at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
> We are thinking of two Sun's Thumper X4500 servers for a fork lifting
> upgrade to our IMAP servers. The x4500 is relatively new but a few
> reports on the Internet gave it a thumb up, particularly on the use
> of
> ZFS and IOPS of RAIDZ. 
> 
> Mail is one of the application cited by Sun for such a box. We have
> about 30k users with various size of mailboxes. Any experience or
> opinion regarding the use of such hardware for IMAP server will be
> helpful to us.


  I have not used the x4500 myself for mail, but I would just be carefully about IO performance.  You'll have to get more storage than you need, because you will need the spindles.  Don't expect to be able to fill the disks with mail, because you'll hit the physical limit of IOPS per disk first.

  So order the x4500 with the smallest available disks, and get as many of them as your budget allows.  ZFS does a pretty good good of spreading IO to a logical disk over all available physical disks, so I don't think you need to worry about creating lots of partitions for different aspects of Cyrus (ex. metadata, spool, etc).


Tom