cyrus on iscsi

[Jeffrey Eaton]

Gary Mills wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 09:20:39PM -0500, Jeffrey T Eaton wrote:
>> Our system consists of 10 backend servers.  Each is a Sun v240 running
>> Solaris 8, with a QLogic iSCSI initiator with two gigabit ethernet
>> links to our SAN network.  Each system mounts 4x250 GB paritions for
>> mailbox storage, and one 50GB partition for Cyrus databases, logs, and
>> sieve scripts.
> 
> If you upgrade to Solaris 10, you can omit the QLogic cards by using
> the native Iscsi initiator instead.  It may actually work better.
> 

We do have some Solaris 10 machines (not mail servers) using the native 
software iSCSI initiator.  There was some concern about performance, 
particularly when doing heavy IO, such as for backups.  I haven't 
personally looked to compare the relative performance of the two, however.

We will probably be upgrading to Solaris 10 for our backend mailservers 
in the very near future, because Sun doesn't appear to be selling any 
more v240's, and the v245's won't boot Solaris 8.  We may also seriously 
consider dropping the Sun hardware entirely, and moving toward Linux. 
The rest of our mail infrastructure already runs on Linux (frontends, 
mupdate, and smtp/mx layer), so it seems likely that we will at least 
consider it.

-jeaton