> We have over 3,000 users. I am not sure how many messages per day
> but we are a school and it gets used very heavily.
The number of E-mails sent/received per day is much more useful in determing what
resources to allocate to the virus scanning than the number of E-mails per day. We
have a free program "Domain Lister" at http://www.declude.com/tools that will let you
know the number of E-mails sent/received per day.
> We also send a lot of attachments.
Believe it or not, that won't make a huge difference. The problem is that Microsoft
allows viruses to spread through HTML, so any E-mail sent with HTML has to be scanned
as well.
> Currently we have a single processor at 400 MHZ
> running NT server. We have a new machine with dual 866 MHZ running
> NT server that will be replacing it shortly.
A dual 866 should be able to handle quite a lot of virus scanning on its own. If
speed is essential, and the number of E-mails sent/received per day justifies it, you
could take the current hardware and run it as a dedicated virus scanner (which would
have the added benefit of acting as a backup mail server).
On the 400MHZ machine, you would likely be able to scan in the order of 10,000 to
40,000 E-mails per day before noticing a slowdown. I would imagine a dual 866MHz
machine would be able to handle 50,000 to 100,000+ E-mails/day before a slowdown was
noticed (and could handle quite a bit more than that before users started complaining).
If you are considering running two servers, it might actually be best to have the
virus scanning on the new machine, and keep the old one as the mail server, since
virus scanning uses much more CPU time than regular mail activities.
--
-Scott
Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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