[Dovecot] Hardware infrastructure for email system

[Alex Crow]

On 23/06/12 19:21, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>> ALT storage, so for instance you could keep your indexes in a RAID10 
>> of SSDs, recent email on a RAID10 of 10kRPM/15kRPM SAS drives, and 
>> older email can go on a load of 5k/7.2k SATA drives in RAID6, or on a 
>> NAS via NFS.
>
> far better solution but still about 2-3 times more $/performance than 
> needed, and more complex than needed.
>
> But at least an improvement
>

I'd respectfully disagree. If you only keep the most recent few weeks of 
email you could use reasonably priced SSDs for the indexes and perhaps 
downgrade to SATA for your "hot" store, both of which should be max 10% 
of your total space with more than a few months of email. My driving 
factor was to have different spindle sets for each purpose. Who knows, I 
might have overspent and could have done it with 3 separate SATA arrays.

OTOH what about an SSD caching kit on your server? Supermicro at least 
do them (well, my UK vendor offers them). Just have a load of big SATA 
drives and use the kit for caching. The last time I looked a 256GB kit 
was about UKP 500.

Cheers

Alex

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