On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, J.R. Van Valen wrote:
> As for the 7 POP/IMAP servers: We find that it is much more effecient at
> eliminating the effect of mail outages. If one of the servers has issues,
> then only 1/7th of our user-base can not access mail.
>
> This definitely lightens the load for our help desk during mail outages.
> If we were to use fewer servers, then during a mail outage, our HelpDesk
> would be (and has been) swamped with a nearly un-manageable amount of
> calls.
Have you not considered doing some sort of load-balancing or using some smart
load-balancing hardware to try and alleviate this even further? If done
properly, you could loose 6 of your servers and your users probably would just
think things were a bit slow rather than dead altogether for them.
This sort of technology can be quite expensive, but I think you could probably
adapt something like
http://www.eddieware.org/ to try and help you do this for
a relatively low cost. I've never tried it myself, but I have used other
load-balancing technologies, and always found when working properly that it was
more or less invaluable - maintenance could be down in core hours providing you
left at least one server up in that service group, etc.
--
Paul Robinson - Internet Services @ Akita -
http://www.akita.co.uk
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