Mail server specs

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Sasiki

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I have a windows server 2003 right now that does my antivirus / antispyware. It is a dual xeon 2.4ghz, 3gb ram, 2x 200gb IDE hard drives mirrored. With the Trend Micro Viruswall running, typical usage is 5% CPU and 650mb RAM. I'm thinking is has plenty of horsepower left to hold a Merak Icewarp mail server for about 80 users. Our daily mail volume is roughly 1000 messages.

What do you guys think? Go with it or rethink the idea? Since the Merak has antivirus and antispam built in, I may even disable the trend scanning since it's scrubbed through a Barracuda before it hits my network.

Do any of you have experience with the Merak software?
 
80 users will, over time, generate a lot more than a 1000 messages a day in spam alone. But that's beside the point; The hardware looks fine except for two things.

1) Disks. You have essentially 1 disk's worth of bandwidth. I wouldn't rely on this, opting for a raid 5 array of some sort.
2) No backup device. I see no way to store the data offsite or to do nightly backups.
 
I forgot to mention that no mail will be stored on the server. It all gets pushed to the users computer. I have all pc's on scheduled backups to a network hard drive which I rotate every week.
Regarding the e-mail volume, the 1000 messages a day is spam and legitimate. With the Barracuda in place, the spam is minimal, but it's still there.
The said server was in place before my time here. It's probably a little over a year old. It's an HP Proliant DL140. It has no SATA ports and no onboard RAID. It's a 1U and only holds 2 drives.
In an ideal world, I'd have the funds to build a new server with raid 5.
So regarding the fact that the only mail on the server will be unread, is it such a critial issue that it's only mirrored?
 
Blitzrommel said:
You'd be fine with mirroring.
Click to expand...


QFT. Mirroring is faster than RAID 5 in most situations.

However IDE is not the way to go. Mail server typically are heavy disk I/O. I would try to fit two sata disk in it if you have room for the controller.
 
Sasiki said:
So regarding the fact that the only mail on the server will be unread, is it such a critial issue that it's only mirrored?
Click to expand...
It's not ideal, but I don't think it'll be that critical. You may notice slow downs and the like during peak usage times. I've seen an issue with windows where under heavy disk usage it'll corrupt files, but I'm willing to believe that was hardware based those times I've seen it.

Another word about email volume: 80 people will generate a lot more than 1000 emails a day. I have an email server for a dental office that's doing over 6000 a day in email ( 60 accounts ), with about 2000 connection attempts dropped by spamhaus ( so we'll never really know the overall total number of email delivery attempts ).
 
oakfan52 said:
QFT. Mirroring is faster than RAID 5 in most situations.

However IDE is not the way to go. Mail server typically are heavy disk I/O. I would try to fit two sata disk in it if you have room for the controller.
Click to expand...

IDE or SATA no diff, HD's cant even use the ata100 or IDE so your suggestion is useless.

i have an exchange server that was running on one IDE drive and 1 SCSI drive wth 1 account an almost 10k in emails through it, and i had no issues with I/O (now being upgraded) oh, and it only had 1g of ram and ran dual PIII 733's slot 1 cpu's.


if most of the spam is caught and removed via your antispam software mirror should be fine.

if anything look for an app for that mail server that lets you simulate the software on load (i know this can be done for exchange)

if needed and allowd you could consider a SAS set up externally off the server.
 
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