Subject: Re: How many people to admin a Cyrus system?
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007, Gary Mills wrote:
We have a moderate-sized Cyrus system for 30,000 students and 3000
employees. It's a critical service in the sense that thousands of
people depend on it. It has excellent performance, lots of
capacity,
and plans for expansion. I'm the only one familiar enough with
Cyrus
...
I am the sole person responsible for the Cyrus installation at
Oregon
State University. Our Cyrus system is similar in size, although
most of
My opinion is that at least couple of people knowledgeable about the
mail systems would be a good idea. In my experience Murphys laws hit
hard when the people in the know are at the holidays or like. And of
course if people change their workplace you always have another person
inhouse who knows the mail system well. My experience is mostly from
small business, moderately sized educational institutions (for
Finland) and hobbyist installations, but mail backends seems in
general to be pretty happy with minimal care (excluding Lotus ;) ).
I am using Cyrus for very small user base, 20ish user hobbyist system,
so I don't really know what happens when you have thousands of users.
For us Cyrus has worked like charm though, surviving OS version bumps,
migration from BDB to skiplist and so on. Worst thing that ever
happened was major power outage and severe accompanied power surges at
our co-lo (which being cheap doesn't have UPSes nor allow using
one...) which caused poor old UFS some distress.
My director seems interested in outsourcing our e-mail system,
judging
by the number of articles on outsourcing that he sends to me.
Google
and Zimbra with a commercial contractor are the latest two.
Replacing
a perfectly functioning e-mail system seems ludicrous to me, as
does
subjecting our users to a migration for no reason. I assume at
least
that he wants vendors to quote on a replacement system. Perhaps
once
he sees the cost, he will change his mind. I suppose it depends on
whether the quote includes the real cost. Does anyone here have
experience in this area? I know that CMU and other universities
want
to maintain their own e-mail systems. What's the justification in
these cases?
The biggest benefit I can see in the outsourcing is that you
*hopefully* have enough qualified staff in the helpdesk - As in my
experience that is the biggest human resource hog in mail systems, and
the need of helpdesk staff grows along the amount of mail accounts. Of
course having well written documentation on how to read your mail with
the chosen mail client helps a lot, but there always are those people
who want to see the staff in person or ask help in the phone.
The drawbacks though, at least as I see them are:
If the mail system is outside your local network, what happens when
the Internet connection dies for some reason? Of course, the mail from
outside doesn't work in such situation, but with internal mail
infrastructure, at least the mail inside the local network works.
Sadly much of the support staff used by the outsourcing companies
isn't that great either, so you might have instant response to
distress call or email, but the support might be second rate.
Outsourcing also loses you more or less agility in the administration
of mail system, which might be a drawback depending on circumstances.
In small organisations the agility is lost if you need temporary email
accounts for contract workers or other short term things, usually on a
short notice. On larger organisations you can't have your own upkeep
scripts deactivating or reactivating accounts etc. which might lead on
gathering of fluff on the mail system.
In general what I've learnt from talking with people who have
outsourcing experience, the cheap outsourcing alternatives can have
pretty steep hidden costs. Better grade services from the wholesale IT
companies tend to be better grade than the El Cheapos, but they do
cost significantly more as well. Generally at least here in Finland,
outsourcing isn't the cheapest alternative.
And of course on the topic of Google, I'm not sure if I wanted my mail
trawled for personalised advertising keywords...
And then the scourge of modern e-mail, spam and virii. With your own
e-mail system you can be just as relaxed or strict as you want and you
can plan the whole defense strategy on the exact knowledge how the
mailing system works from the border mail router to the client.
If your boss is bent on outsourcing, at least make him to ask the
quotes based on the current properties of your present e-mail system:
availability, backups, response times, what happens if there's major
problem at weekend/holiday time etc. Having those in the contract with
punishments if the promises are not met wouldn't be bad either.
I can understand why a small organization would outsource email, but
30,000 accounts is not small by any measure. A 30,000
