Ack, how big do these mail servers need to be?

[brian_riendeau]

I work for an internet support company and today I got an email about our mail server (which was running slow). Everyone is set up with an Outlook 2000 account from the start and we use that as a primary mode of communication. All emails are stored so that we can access them at any computer just by loggin into Win98 and then Outlook. The email was regarding how the mail server is being brought to its knees by the 1,800+ users accessing it. The current server is a P3 500 with 1.8GB and RAM and 48GB of HD storage. The planned upgrade is going to be a small cluster setup. So my question is this, how huge do these mail server get in larger companies?

 

[Vegito]

HOLY COW!

Well, actually which mail server are you using ?

I have 15 guys on a Exchange Server

Dual P3-500
512MB
18Gig x 3 - RAID 5 - Data
9.1 x 2 - RAID 0 - Boot
Maxtor MaxAttach 160GB - RAID 5 - Data

This guy is crawling.

You should have 1-2 more server if you have 1800 guys on exchange but if it's not exchange, you might not need that much power.

 

[Wizkid]

<< All emails are stored >>



^ that is your problem... the more emails that you have stored the slower this thing is likely to run because it has to work harder to find new messages, and when someone logs onto to a computer that they haven't been on before they will have to download ALL of their messages. The better way to do this is to use windows nt/2000 and save the outlook PST file in each user's profile so that it is accessible to them wherever they are, but it relieves the strain on the mail server.

 

[Wizkid]

Forgot this: at work here we use ccMail for email. We have approximately 60 000 employees so running one big mail server would never work Each location (or large department) has it's own email server, and these servers then communicate with eachother to get the mail where it has to go Each server would house around 100 people and runs on a PII 300 or so with 64 MB's of RAM... some a little faster, some slower, but you get the idea

If all you are doing is email, then exchange is a waste of resources. Try something like IMail http://www.ipswitch.com and it scales better and is much easier on the computer

 

[phlick]

Here at a &quot;large software company in Redmond, WA&quot; we are in the process of converting from many pretty large servers 1 extremely humongus SAN server. I think actual size after fault tolerance is around 1.5 TB, running on several clustered Compaq 8500's w/8 550 Mhz procs (xeon3 w/2mb cache) in each server, like 4gb ram per box. Trying to be somewhat vague but should give you an idea. Fibre switches too.