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. 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
