While youre considering proprietary solutions and naturally, would like to pay for them, perhaps you should consider redhat's GFS thingie. Its GPL but redhat offers it with their AS for an extra $$
Ive seen it work and it seems like quite a scalable solution and tipically cheaper than buying a SAN. However, sans do offer plenty advantages on some environments (wann have the winboxes and linboxes scsi-plugged into the same san), if this is just for email, this can be a cheaper solution. With this kind of thing, what you get to do is plug three or more boxes with whatever storage they have and then store on all of them. This thing works with LVM2 so you can partition, snapshot and share it to your hearts content. Put a solid GB net on it with separate NICS (from the NICS youll be using to actually provide service) for best results. On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 14:20 -0600, Nicholas Harring wrote: > > > > 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
