Hi Brian, Brian Candler wrote:
In this case, mail is stored using operations to an NFS server, which is dumb as far as mail is concerned: it doesn't know anything about mailboxes, just files and directories. This approach works very well in practice: it can be more efficient because only one database lookup needs to be made for each incoming piece of mail and each incoming POP3/IMAP connection, and it's easy to scale, by adding more MX frontends, more POP3/IMAP frontends, and more NFS server backends. (You just mount these on different directories, say /mail1, /mail2, /mail3 etc, and the database includes the full path to the user's Maildir, so you can specify which users are on which NFS servers) The only hard part is making an NFS server which is fast and resilient. You can buy your way out of this problem, by getting something like a Network Appliance NFS server (www.netapp.com). Using their clustered machines, like the FAS270C, you have two independent NFS server boxes, each of which can take over the disks belonging to the other front-end if it fails. The performance is astounding and they are also easy to manage, e.g. you can grow volumes on a live system just by adding more disks.
We are currently investigating a high availability mail solution. Can you tell me how many maildirs you have on your netapp. And how many servers are accessing the maildirs?
I would appreciate your comments very much! -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Rudy Gevaert e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Directie ICT, Afdeling Infrastructuur Groep Systemen tel: +32 9 264 4734 Universiteit Gent / Ghent University fax: +32 9 264 4994 Krijgslaan 281, gebouw S9, 9000 Gent, Belgie www.UGent.be -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Courier-imap mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-imap
