That would be about 500 gigs of email. Fry's Electronics has drives that size on special for $189. So - I'd say yes, should be fairly easy to scale up to that size and beyond.
You really think one 500 gig disk is going to give you anywhere close to the performance you need to accomodate 500 active gigs of mailboxes? If you had 30x 18 gig fibre-channel drives spread out over many controllers and many machines you might have half a chance of keeping up.
If you put, say, 5 of those disks on each of 6 servers, you'd still need a way to (reliably) aggregate those 30 disks into one large storage facility, and the database engine on all 6 of those servers would have to be aware that it was just 1/6 of the equation at all times.
There would be no redundancy at that point. You could probably get a 7th server with a bunch of large slow disks and use that to back up the data on the real cluster. But you'd never be able to move 'production' over to the backup server, there'd just be too little disk throughput for it to work.
And by the way, 10k users isn't a lot. I have 3000 users, and I'd consider us to be a miniscule operation compared to many others out there. Scale this to 250k users and we're talking...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | Jason Marshall, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Spots InterConnect, Inc. Calgary, AB | =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
