On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:34:02AM +0100, Peer Heinlein wrote:
I have> 11 TB hard used Mailstorage, saved als maildir in ext3 on HP EVA.
You have 11 TB of mails on a non cluster filesystem?
Yes.
I don't believe a clustered filesystem would have more performance and would be more rock solid.
I don't have a problem on my frontend server. Why should I have two or more of them? I have a problem in my backend. My SAN has too much to do. Why should a cluster filesystem be better for my SAN?
Agree. A non-clustered fs should give you better performance, and probably also be more reliable, if you can live with the SPoF and full downtime during patching/upgrades/maintenance. But I would expect xfs to be a better choice than ext*.
We have about the same storage size as you (12TB/115M-inodes), with the backup-process almost biting itself in the tail every day, but I can't quite imagine running it all on a single local fs with no scale-out options if we should want/need more processing power for dovecot. I'm looking forward to moving to mdbox soonish.. to reduce the number of files and speed up the backup process.
-jf