Re: Mail server

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:27:56AM -0600, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote:
> Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a 
> mail server for N users?
> 
> I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things 
> for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to 
> suit. \:
> 
> I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help.

pretty nearly any relatively "modern" (as in less than 5 years old)
machine will be more than capable of handling mail for 1000 users.

spend between $500 and $1000 USD on a decent new machine and you'll have
no problems.  pay attention to the brand/model of the motherboard and
the disk drive(s), they are the most important components.

this won't give you any crash-proofing or crash-recovery - for that you
need RAID 1, 0+1 or 5 disk (it's the only form of "backup" that is any
use at all for extremely transient data like email)...which will add
significantly to the price.  my preference is for RAID-5 with a large
non-volatile write-cache...very fast & very safe.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>

Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
 -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch