Commercial Mail Server

[Julian Field]

At 20:04 21/10/2002, you wrote:
>Been using mailscanner on our linux server for a while an as we all know
>it's great!

Would you mind adding a comment to the "guest book" on the web site please?

>I have client wanting a commercial enterprise e-mail server (to replace
>exchange). I would also like it to use mailscanner plus sophos....
>
>Any recommendations:
>
>Server spec - 600+ users

Is it going to be a pop server or imap server as well? I guess the answer
is "yes".
600+ users isn't very many really. I doubt cpu or ram are likely to be a
problem. But for reliability I would personally use either a Sun workgroup
server, or a decent PC server from someone like Transtec or Dell/HP. Don't
skimp on the maintenance contract, and try to get multiple redundant
everything if you can, that's why I would use a Sun (or a Sun clone from
Transtec).

Reliability is the key for any enterprise server. "Normal" PC's just aren't
good enough. You need a system that can detect a hardware failure and
handle it itself (usually by triggering a reboot which then restarts the OS
without using the dead piece of hardware). A hardware watchdog timer would
be essential too (hardware that detects an OS hang/crash and triggers a
reboot automatically). Don't know about PC servers, but Sun kit can
certainly do all that (for a price).

I hope that is of some use to you.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ