[Dovecot] Architecture for large Dovecot cluster

[Tom Johnson]

> On Jan 24, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 1/24/2014 11:09 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>> Is anybody using the Object Storage plugin for large-scale
>> installations?  
> 
> I've not used it.
> 
>> We're considering it, but are thinking of an in-house
>> S3 storage system (riak, or ceph, or ?)   Looking to support perhaps
>> 300k users.  I was thinking that if we use a bank of dovecot servers
>> (with director) with ssds as cache, we might be able to consolidate
>> all the storage on something like a riak cluster, which would make
>> scaling simple and inexpensive - certainly much less than a NetApp
>> solution.
> 
> Everything costs less than a NetApp...except an EMC.
> 
>> If anyone has any first-hand experience (or even
>> off-the-top-of-their-head thoughts), I'd love to hear them)

(Stan gives a great run-down on the economics of using a NetApp or even homegrown NFS filer versus using an object storage backend.)

I am quite familiar with NetApp, and EMC - I used to have a number of Celera file servers back in my BigFish/FrontBridge days. 

But now I'm in a situation where I have dozens of servers with spare storage bays and unused CPU cycles sitting in data centers where the power is already provisioned, and a DFS is what makes most sense for me now. 

So, I would like to ask once again- is anyone on the list using the object storage plugin for dovecot at any reasonably large scale, whether it's an in-house storage solution or S3?

Thanks-

Tom