[Dovecot] Scalability plans: Abstract out filesystem and make it someone else's problem

[Timo Sirainen]

On Aug 11, 2009, at 12:41 AM, Seth Mattinen wrote:

>> Nothing forces you to switch from maildir, if you're happy with it :)
>> But if you want to support millions of users, it's simpler to  
>> distribute
>> the storage and disk I/O evenly across hundreds of servers using a
>> database that was designed for it. And by databases I mean here  
>> some of
>> those key/value-like databases, not SQL. (What's a good collective  
>> name
>> for those dbs anyway? BASE and NoSQL are a couple names I've seen.)
>>
>
>
> Why is a database a better choice than a clustered filesystem?

Show me a clustered filesystem that can guarantee that each file is  
stored in at least 3 different data centers and can scale linearly by  
simply adding more servers (let's say at least up to thousands).

Clustered filesystems are also complex. They're much more complex than  
what Dovecot really requires.