> > Hi, > > when going the "Maildir on NFS for clustering"-route, is using NetApp > Filers still considered "state of the art" or has something better > emerged? There are plenty of other NAS options, see EMC for one vendor (also not cheap). Dell offers NAS, HP I believe does as well. Not sure how much clustering they offer, and what sort of feature set it has compared to NetApp. > From a price-point, I'd rather use FreeBSD, but the fact that there's > no real volume-manager makes it unusable for our purposes. > I've actually mailed Blue Arc about their hardware, but despite not > being in the black, they didn't feel it necessary to answer my query. For a smaller cluster or one that doesn't have hard uptime commitments in the 4 or 5 9s range I'd say that a *nix solution would work just fine. If you laid something like Veritas Clustering on top of it then moving into the "real" HA range should also be quite possible and supportable. > > Does anybody have any sizing-information? NetApp offers a lot of > hardware and even the entry-level stuff is not cheap. > I'd like to know how many deliveries/h one can make e.g. with a small > FAS 270. I'm running 8 servers (4 smtp, 4 pop/imap) on an F820c cluster doing around 600k messages daily. I don't have any hourly stats at the moment, but that load is spread with about 80% across 10-12 hours with the remainder spread evenly across the other 12-14. I'm currently upgrading my cluster to FAS3050s but not due to performance reasons, but rather storage consolidation throughout my network.
To see how that compares you might try using their spec_nfs numbers since they'd be roughly representative of the type of load you'd be using. > cheers, > Rainer I do have to say NetApp has been the easiest, most reliable vendor I've ever worked with in the IT realm. Their support is top notch, the only time there's been a hardware failure they knew about it before I did (I was out to lunch when the drive died and they called moments later). Even their VARs actually add value rather than just price. For sizing I initially worked with the VAR they use in the Chicago area (INCAT) and they were immensely helpful in determining what we needed and not overselling me. One other consideration when using NetApp is that they have a lot of features that would help with things like disaster recovery, backups, etc. These are the areas where NetApp and EMC typically clobber everyone else, and the reason you find them so frequently in high volume high availability data environments. Hope that helps, Nick
