I have a small but critical server that supports our group. As a single server - it's obviously a single-point-of-failure for lots of things. As I just experienced...again. It was a lot more fun building systems from components when I was younger...
Previously 3rd-party hosted solutions didn't look attractive for several reasons...but I'm seeing prices now for cloud virtual machines that are stupid cheap. Even if they wind up being limited speed & availability - it would seem they'd be a lot better than nothing!
So I'm considering having at least one backup server for various services - obviously that includes mail. So now I have to wonder about the backend. And while I think I'm reasonably current with networked file systems (not distributed or cluster) I haven't played with replication for a quite a while.
For this particular usage (I'm envisioning two servers total) - is there a need/reason to use any form of networked/distributed/cluster file storage? Or would this be accomplished via "pure" Dovecot - dsync replication would keep things updated between the servers and director would handle the connections? So with identically configured SMTP servers, passing to the local LMTP agents, the file system would be "purely local" with no NFS or other interconnection?
-- Daniel