[Dovecot] Dovecot and SATA Backend

[Nicolas GRENECHE]

Hi all,

I plan to run a dovecot IMAPS and POPS service on our network. We
handle about 3 000 mailboxes. I thought first buying a topnotch server
(8 cores and 16 Go RAM) with equalogic iSCSI SAN SAS 15K for storage
backend.

On second though (and after a comprhensive read of dovecot features),
I saw in http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation that index files can be
created on a separete local filesystem. My question is : for 3000
users, is it possible to have only a SATA backend attached to my
topnotch server (to handle bigger mail quotas) by storing index on
local hard drives (SAS drives) ?

Extra question, what is the better : iSCSI SATA backend or NFS share ?
NFS share is more convenient to have a failover server.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

--
Nicolas Grenèche - Orléans University - France
http://blog.garnett.fr (in french)