[Semi-OT] Advice on large webmail setup

[Res]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Neil Thompson wrote:

> As the resident Linux guru, I've just been tasked with costing a webmail setup
> for about 600 000 users.  They each have 10MiB (small, I know) mailboxes.  The
> current setup has about 40 million web page accesses per month.  No more info

I hope your sitting down :)

You'd be looking at, as a base, 6x HP RX8640 servers, on your figures 
thats little over 900 hits per minute so 6 of these load balanced should do 
the trick with plenty to spare incase of failure of one or two of them. An 
SFS20 storage unit would be recommended which from memory is at least 2PB.

Definately use MailDir, vpopmail, it will handle 23 million users per 
domain (times 23 million domains as well) with its structure so its by far 
best suited, you could use qmail on backends since vpopmail is designed 
around it.

You could use squirrelmail or sqwebmail, sqwebmail is simplest and IMHO 
more secure, but it depends on what features you want your users to have.

Use hardware based load balancers, Foundry, also use Foundry switches if 
you can, the quality is superior to anything else on the market.

Cost is hard to say as it varies country to country, but nothing 
short of 1 million as a very base starting budget, but for 600K users 
$1m should be nothing... Talk to HP about your needs.


-- 
Cheers
Res

"We can be Heroes, just for one day" - Davey (Jones) Bowie