[Dovecot] Maildir over NFS

[Noel Butler]

On Sat, 2010-08-07 at 15:18 -0700, Maxwell Reid wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 3:06 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com>wrote:
> 
> > Noel Butler put forth on 8/6/2010 4:29 PM:
> >
> > > Actually you will not notice any difference. How do you think all the
> > > big boys do it now :)  Granted some opted for the SAN approach over NAS,
> > > but for mail, NAS is better way to go IMHO and plenty of large services,
> > > ISP, corporations, and universities etc, all use NAS.
> >
> > The protocol overhead of the NFS stack is such that one way latency is in
> > the
> > 1-50 millisecond range, depending on specific implementations and server
> > load.
> >
> 
> Yes, I would say NFS has greater overhead, but it allows for multi system
> access where fiber channel does not unless you're using  clustered
> filesystems which have their own issues with latency and lock management....
> it's also worth noting  that the latencies between the storage and mail
> processing nodes is an insignificant bottle neck compared to the usual
> latencies between the client and mail processing nodes.
> 
> 

*nods*

Thats why my very first line said  ' will not  "notice"  any difference
'
  

> > Those who would recommend NFS/NAS over fibre channel SAN have no experience
> > with fibre channel SANs.
> 
> 
> 
> Bold statement there sir :-)   From a price performance ratio, I'd argue NAS
> is far superior and scalable, and generally there is far less management


and with large mail systems, scalability is what it is all about

Cheers