Jeff Koch wrote:
Hi:
Does anyone have cost effective hardware recommendations for a single
server qmail toaster in a production environment?
We have been having pretty good success with 2.8Ghz P4 servers with 1GB
RAM and 80GB IDE or SATA drives running CentOS 3.4. We were concerned
about the drives crashing so we tried the same setup with a 3ware IDE
RAID card with RAID 1 mirroring. It was a total disaster. The RAID card
could not keep up with the large number of small file reads and writes
associated with qmail. 90% of the CPU capacity was being wasted in the
IOWAIT state and the queue built up to 20,000 emails.
We would very much like to protect the qmail server against hard crashes
with RAID but now we don't know if it is possible. Has anyone had any
success with hardware or software RAID in a high volume environment? If
so, how did you do it?
First off, RAID 1 is going to be pretty resource intensive in any
situation. You're better off using more drives and doing RAID 5.
If you just want an integrated raid solution, you might consider one of
these:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/6023/SYS-6023P-8.cfm
You could go with the recommended 2010S Adaptec controller, which I
think is around $200, and would probably be ok for a lower traffic
server. But if you might consider the 2130slp, which is around $600 or
so and should handle much higher loads.
I happen to have a 6023P-8 for sale (shameless plug). If you or anyone
else is interested, write me off-list.
If you want more of an inexpensive NAS solution for a clustered
environment, you might consider apple's Xserve and Xserve RAID combo.
You can connect 2 Xserves via fiber channel to the RAID for one more
point of redundancy, and they are comparatively pretty cheap for a NAS
solution. Since OS X is BSD based, I suspect the NFS performance would
be quite good. I have not tested them myself, though.
HTH,
Bill
