Real World Performance question

[cpm]

Okay, Zimbra's been out for a while.

I looked at it pretty closely about 14-15 months ago. At that time,
I wasn't willing to part with the email system I'd just built about 18
months prior to that.

In the mean time, Zimbra has matured, and my dear system is showing
it's age.

So, I'm back.

By now, I would expect that folks had some serious time with it, and
had a good feel for how it performs.

I have about 100 users, and a mail store that is now over 300gigs, and growing.

I noticed that the suggested configuration for servers now says that RAID 5
isn't recommended for mailstores over 100 users. Why is that? RAID 5 can't
keep up with the disk io ? I'm now in love with RAID 10 anyway, but I'm
concerned that Zimbra just can't handle a mail store like mine.

So, what's realistic?

How big a mail store can Zimbra actually handle?

enquiring minds wanna know.

[phoenix]

I have about 100 users, and a mail store that is now over 300gigs, and growing. ......................... I'm now in love with RAID 10 anyway, but I'm concerned that Zimbra just can't handle a mail store like mine.

Only 100 users and 300Gb, that's nothing spectacular. Some of the Zimbra customers have mailbox numbers into the ..... well, let's say extremely large. Have a look at a partial customer list here and imagine how many users they have.

If you're talking about a single server then depending on the specs you shouldn't have any problems with that. If you like, you could always go for a clustered solution with the NE version.

RAID5 will not do the job for write speeds, you need something like RAID10. It has been mentioned several times in the forums, do a quick search.

[cpm]

Brilliant response, thanks kindly.
Yes, I was concerned, I kept reading about 'thousands of users and
20 gb of mail' which had me worried.

Yes, I'm thinking of single box solution. Will be RAID 10.

Again, thanks much.

Now, if I could get it to run on FC6

[phoenix]

I always forget to mention this but memory is also the thing Zimbra needs plenty of, your server will be more responsive if you give it the recommended 2Gb plus.

My personal choice would be CentOS4 for stability, but I guess anything your comfortable with will be fine.