BRe: [KLUG Members] NFS / server tuning for mail storage?

[Kevin Mitchell]

We currently run about 50,000 email accounts in a way similar to what 
Adam Bultman is trying to do.  I know that Michigan State University and 
CoreComm also use Network Appliances to host their email.  Even Slashdot's 
email is hosted on a Network Appliance. ;)

While NFS has its problems, IMHO Network Appliance does a good job in 
making it better and very useful for applications like this. Our network 
is not destroyed by it.  Our users are not complaining.

We did the single multiprocessor highly redundant server thing for a while 
and found that when we outgrew it we needed to buy a more expensive bigger 
single multiprocessor highly redudant server.  It just didn't make sense 
for us.

For those that care, using tcp and NFS version 3 helps out quite a bit.  I 
didn't find much benefit in changing the read and write sizes.

Oh, and if you think hosting email via NFS is crazy, I can do you one 
better.  I have 3 Oracle databases that operate off of the Network 
Appliance filer.  Yep, Oracle over NFS.  A cold backup of a 150gb 
database takes 30 seconds.  :)

Kevin

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Jamie McCarthy wrote:

> adam at morrison-ind.com (Adam Tauno Williams) writes:
>
>>> My plans are to use LVS and balance say, 3 to 4 servers from
>>> the 800 to 1200 MHz range handling mail services, with them all
>>> connecting to the netapp back end via NFS.
>>
>> You are crazy.
>>
>> (a) NFS latency and locking issues will *****DESTROY****** your
>> network.
>
> Yeah.  NFS is really a lousy filesystem.  It's just barely good
> enough to use on small projects, but for serious work it just falls
> apart.
>
> At least for read/write data.  It seems to work fine for mounts that
> are shared read-only.  Slashdot's webheads all mount the application
> code and data with read-only NFS and it's been a long time since
> we've had any problems.  (We had a lockups every six months, some
> years ago, but those went away after some upgrade in '03 or '04.)
> So if you just want to push data from a central location out to a
> bunch of servers, NFS is worth considering.
> -- 
>  Jamie McCarthy
> http://mccarthy.vg/
>  jamie at mccarthy.vg
>
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