[34230] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Scalable Mail solution with NAS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Neil J. McRae)
Wed Jan 31 15:14:51 2001
From: "Neil J. McRae" <neil@DOMINO.ORG>
Message-Id: <200101312011.UAA28880@equinox.DOMINO.ORG>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0101311434120.10305-100000@localhost.localdomain> from Sebastien Berube at "Jan 31, 2001 02:49:12 pm"
To: sberube@zeroknowledge.com (Sebastien Berube)
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 20:11:03 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: mzito@register.com (Matthew Zito),
sobo@cisco.com (Eric Sobocinski), nanog@merit.edu
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Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> > > >/export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox
In the past I've actually found that reversing the letters gives
much better randomosity around the directory structure so, johndoe@clown.org
would end up in e/o/d/n/johndoe and you don't take much of a hit for this.
> > very costly, though, because of all the recursive directories. Also, you're
> > going to end up with some directories very imbalanced, since there are more
> > frequently occurring names.
> It also makes backups a nightmare. In that case, you'll have to shutdown
> the entire mail system before you can backup or you'll have a database
> image which won't represent the actual data you have on your NAS.
In a high performance/availability system typical tape/spool based backups
are problematic - with netapp you have a number of options to handle
this [snap mirror etc]. It really depends on your turn over of data which
for mail is usually pretty high. [oh and IBM disks tend to make a huge
difference :-)]. Ofcourse spool type backups are fine for the OS and
configurations.
Regards,
Neil.
