Dell Server and storage capacity

[surzycki]

Hello,

I am looking for some information regarding Dell servers and their pratical use. Is anyone using any dell server for large scale productions, ie ISP providing millions of email acounts, or similar large production with high storage capacity?

Thanks for any info in advance

Stefan

 

[NickFerrar]

Bear in mind Dell have their own technical consultants, if it's a big job you should get them involved early rather than trying to design it yourself then fit in Dell products with it.

 

[xmsre]

The dell model is to sell the engagement then subcontract the work to partners. As for the servers, you can scale to whatever you want. Your choices are scale up or scale out.

On the scale up side, a pair of 6650s with quad procs and 4GB RAM on each node coneected to CX series storage can handle about 10K heavy users in a A/P cluster configuration. On the scale out side, you add more clusters and can do this to create environments with millions of users. The largest I've personally done is a quarter million mailboxes - give or take a thousand. I've seen larger environments, I just have no direct experience implementing them. The key is to figure out what the IO is going to be and size the storage properly - both capacity and throughput. If the mail platform is Exchange, play with the Exchange 2000 load calculator; it's a free download from Microsoft.

 

[surzycki]

Thanks for the reply,

With your system of 1/4 million mailboxes (was this exchange or a qmail (or linux/unix system?)) what would you estimate the cost of all the machines were?

Stefan

 

[xmsre]

W2K3/E2K3. Hardware was roughly 3,000,000 and software was roughly twice the hardware cost. It came to right around $40/seat.

I just finished up a 5000 seat pilot for a 50,000 seat migration from iplanet to E2K3 for an educational institution. M$ and other vendors have some decent discounts in the educational market, so the cost is going to come out significantly lower per seat. Since last summer, everything I have done has been on Dell hardware.