That's true 200 mailboxes is nothing but it will grow rapidly and I was thinking if I already configure my site with a MURDER configuration I will have less work after adding extra backend server or frontend servers. I would like to start with one frontend server (also running the MUPDATE server) and one backend server. And pretty soon I should be adding a second backend server. Don't you think it's less work for the future if I already start with a mini MURDER configration ?
The administrative overhead of running a Murder versus a standalone IMAP is pretty high. Also, it multiply the number of things that can go wrong (connectivity issue between frontend and backend, MUPDATE, etc).
This will have to be confirmed by people more experienced than me, but I think you could start with a standalone Cyrus server, and when you want to switch to a Murder setup, recompile this server with --enable-murder and make it a backend. As I said, verify this claim before you go ahead as I never did that myself.
Regarding the volume, I would not bother with Murder and other scalabilty technique below 5K accounts. We run a 5 machine Murder (2x backends, 2x frontends and a standalone MUPDATE master) for 85K accounts, and the load barely ever get over 1. Most of these account are for pretty light users of IMAP, but even then. This is using relatively high-end Compaq Proliant servers and hardware RAID.
I really would like to be able to scale rapidly when needed. Also when we will have two backend servers then if one crashes there is still the other where we could quickly restore the mail dbs while reinstalling a new backend server and also only half off the mailboxes will be down for example, that's also another great advantage... Well for us that MURDER/Aggregation architecture looks very promising that's also why we want to use it.
For this scenario, I would rather investigate building a cold-spare and storing your mailspool on a SAN. It would make recovery much, much easier.
Just my 0,02$ anyway.
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