Re: Scalable Mail solution with NAS

[Neil J. McRae]

> > > >/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.