New server request

[Neal Morgan]

<snip>

> I think I need striped SAS disks with 15k spindles, four CPUs, and
16gb 
> of ram. I am open to realistic suggestions, though humor is still 
> welcome. I intend to submit a quote this week.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dave


Dave:

If you're open to a suggestion different than one or two high powered
servers:  we use several virtual machines as "border servers".  These
handle just the inbound messages.

Bots and bad guys seem to prefer to work through the MX records in
reverse order, so we make the first MX record point to physical hardware
and the latter MX records point to the virts.  

We're also using RBL at the MTA, graylisting, and local caching DNS.

Our users connect to a server that is NOT in the MX list.  The border
servers relay only the accepted inbound messages to this guy - so its
workload is substantially reduced.

With things spread across multiple servers, most of our batches during
the day are under ten messages - the longest one I've seen today was 76
seconds.  Most batches are processed in 10 seconds or less.

We've used both MS Virtual Server and VMWare for these.  Both work OK -
though VMWare seems better.  

So my suggestion is you consider spending your hardware budget on one or
two Virt servers and spread the workload a bit.


All the best,

Neal Morgan