[Dovecot] Maildir over NFS

[Noel Butler]

On Sat, 2010-08-07 at 09:17 -0600, CJ Keist wrote:

> All,
>      Thanks for all the information.  I think I'm leaning towards 
> locally attached fiber disk array.  Couple of advantages I see, one it 
> will be faster than NFS, second it will allow us to separate user home 
> directory disk quotas and email disk quotas. Something we have been 
> wanting to do for awhile.
> 


You truly wont notice the difference between NAS/SAN in the "real
world",  we used to use SAN for mail at an old employers, it adds
slightly more complexity, and with large volumes of mail, you want
things as simple as possible, we found NAS much more reliable, the cost
of the units is the same, as netapps do both nas and san, but, if you do
not intend to expand beyond the single server (with 3K users you got a
long way to go unless you introduce redundancy) then attached fiber disk
array will be a cheaper option,  even a low end FAS 2k series we use for
web was about $30K (to get in this country anyway) obviously much
cheaper in the U.S. 

What you could do, is talk to vendors, explain what your considering,
most often they will send you a loan of devices for a few weeks, so you
can configure your scenarios and run the tests, then evaluate which is
the best bang for buck way to go, buy be wary of their sales pushes, you
know what you want, they don't, they may try upsell you what you'll
never ever need.

That said, the one important thing you need to remember, plan for the
future.

All the best in your ventures
Cheers