Umem cards seem a preferred choice, since there's a driver for them in the
standard linux kernel ... But they're kinda hard to find these days, so Rob
Mueller found these in our last discussion:
http://www.curtisssd.com/products/drives/nitrofc/
Rob, do you mind sharing some expiriences with them?
Currently we only use umem and have good experiences. Seem to be stable, fast and just work. Unfortunately I don't think umem are selling to the public anymore, or at least selling only as is, no support. They seem to be concentrating on wholesale corporate sales (eg to companies like netapp that incorporate them into their products, etc). One other issue with umem, since it's a PCI card, if you want a failover type system, then it's not going to be easy, you'll have to regularly sync your data from one to the other and live with some out of date-ness problems with a switchover, or possibly data corruption issues :(
We haven't tried the above nitro drives, though they look promising, albeit quite expensive. On the other hand, by spending a bit more upfront to get high IO on your mailboxes.db/seen dbs/quota dbs, you'll be able to scale to a lot more mailboxes in the future on a particular machine. Hmmm Fibre connectors as well, so it could be held in an external container connected to your 2 failover machines.
If anyone invests in one of these, I'd been keen to hear feedback and experiences with them.
Rob
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