Hardware specs for a mail server..

R

Rishy

Gawd
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Jan 15, 2006
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Say I got a scenario where 10,000 users that need to have 100MB storage space each for their emails...Will be using Exchange server that needs to have 0.2% downtime...

I need the hardware recommendations...No budget as yet...

Im sure you'll need more info, just post what you need and ill find it out..

TIA. ;)
 
10,000 users * 100 MB = 1 TB. And mail storage isn't as simple as buying storage disks. I'd be looking into a Fiber Channel setup, several frontend servers, and a frickin' huge budget. This project needs 14 73GB 15k SAS drives, at least. You should be talking to Sun and HP, not Dell. And don't even consider building the hardware for this yourself - the words "support contract" will become your friends soon.

What are you using this for? And what do you need the 0.2% downtime for? Or is that max not min? :p

 
What mage said above. Go look at major OEM's for a server (probably two of them) and a SAN backend with 1 TB of space or better in a RAID5 config.
 
tdg said:
What mage said above. Go look at major OEM's for a server (probably two of them) and a SAN backend with 1 TB of space or better in a RAID5 config.
Click to expand...
Not raid 5. 0+1 for mail. It's generally lots of tiny, tiny updates, and that's where raid 5 is worst. Also, buy a tape drive for this setup, you'll want it sooner or later.

 
I'd recommend talking to HP on this. We deal with both at my company and HP definitely provides better support and agent visibility from beginning to end and beyond.

I'm no Exchange guru but I do know that the server license you get determines how large your Information store can be without crashing the server. If your looking into skimping on licensing, your going to need a lot more servers to spread out the mailbox/DB size.

If you don't have a SAN in place already it's going to cost your company quite a bit for the initial implimentation. I'd suggest using a clustered server pair with direct attached SCSI storage like this
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/solutions/enterprise/highavailability/dl380/index.html

Setting up two or three clusters will allow you to distribute your mailbox/db load accross multiple platforms and could potentially reduce the licensing requirements for the whole project as you won't have to buy the top of the line Enterprise Exchange license but instead but maybe 3 small business licenses.

Once you have that in place, setup load ballancing between the servers in the cluster using another application like cisco CSS to set that up.

That will get you a high level up-time without spending a small fortune setting up a SAN.
 
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