Anthony Noe wrote: > Thanks for the info. But actually, the clients just asked if I could handle > up to(in perfect world) 60,000. Is that out of range of one cobalt? What > type of machine(s) and software would be best to handle that?
We've built some fairly large mail systems, but never for more than one-tenth this many accounts. For handling a large number of email accounts we generally build servers using qmail (with a lot of custom tweaks) and pop and imap servers designed to work with qmail. We use a separate file-system; for 60,000 accounts each with a 20 megabyte mailstore, you'd need a one-terabyte file system (1,000 gigabytes). While a large single server could theoretically handle this (with a separate file system, of course) as long as you didn't have webmail, I'd go for multiple server cluster with simple (DNS-based) load-balancing and NAS (Network Attached Storage), especially if you need webmail. Are you thinking of backing up a 1.2 terrabyte file system? Now we're really talking money. My guess is you're in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand dollars. And to make sure data transit isn't a bottleneck you'll have to have a pretty good guestimate of how much mail the system would move. A T-1 would be anywhere from overkill to seriously underpowered, depending on how much email was actually moving through the system. Jeff -- Jeff Lasman, nobaloney.net, P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA 92517 US Internet & Unix/Linux/Sun/Cobalt Consulting +1 909 778-9980 Our jblists address used on lists is for list email only To contact us offlist: "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"; _______________________________________________ cobalt-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://list.cobalt.com/mailman/listinfo/cobalt-developers
