Hi,
I've got a very heavily loaded email server, which connects to 2 private networks in our office. It has around 100 GB of emails, with around 35 IMAP accounts, some as big as 10 GB while the smallest is around 100 MB. The biggest IMAP accounts, some 5 in total, consuming a total of around 45 GB are accessed in around 5 clients each.
I want to build a server, with 2 Gbe NICs(one for each networks Gbe switch) without PCI bus bottlenecks, 1 TB of storage under Raid 1, so need to buy 2 TB in effect. The server will run gentoo and postfix+courier-imap for smtp and imap services.
So, I plan to buy some 10k or 15k rpm HDD s of 73 or 148 GB SCSI/SAS drives for these accounts and have the other accounts on SATAII 7.2k of 250/320/500/750 whichever is cost efficient and also power efficient. For eg, if 750GB drive is only 2 times costlier but uses some 12W against some 3 250GB drives consuming 36W, and needs noisy cooling, then I'd prefer 750GB itself, else 3X250 or 3X320GB is also ok.
I've decided to go for dual dual-core opterons with 2 X 2 X 1GB of ECC DDR 400 RAM. And my budget is around USD 3000-5000. Let me know, if you have any suggestions for motherboards, scsi/sata/sas raid cards, Gbe NICs, hdds and let me know, if they have open source drivers too(as I run gentoo).
I've got a very heavily loaded email server, which connects to 2 private networks in our office. It has around 100 GB of emails, with around 35 IMAP accounts, some as big as 10 GB while the smallest is around 100 MB. The biggest IMAP accounts, some 5 in total, consuming a total of around 45 GB are accessed in around 5 clients each.
I want to build a server, with 2 Gbe NICs(one for each networks Gbe switch) without PCI bus bottlenecks, 1 TB of storage under Raid 1, so need to buy 2 TB in effect. The server will run gentoo and postfix+courier-imap for smtp and imap services.
So, I plan to buy some 10k or 15k rpm HDD s of 73 or 148 GB SCSI/SAS drives for these accounts and have the other accounts on SATAII 7.2k of 250/320/500/750 whichever is cost efficient and also power efficient. For eg, if 750GB drive is only 2 times costlier but uses some 12W against some 3 250GB drives consuming 36W, and needs noisy cooling, then I'd prefer 750GB itself, else 3X250 or 3X320GB is also ok.
I've decided to go for dual dual-core opterons with 2 X 2 X 1GB of ECC DDR 400 RAM. And my budget is around USD 3000-5000. Let me know, if you have any suggestions for motherboards, scsi/sata/sas raid cards, Gbe NICs, hdds and let me know, if they have open source drivers too(as I run gentoo).
