Is Mini-ITX viable ?

[uxbod]

Yum yum I have a Intel Atom dual-core with 2GB RAM for my Asterisk server and seriously considering the same for a ZCS installation. 2GB should be enough RAM for two users (me and the missus) and it only draws about 80w

[Bill Brock]

What mobo are you using with the Atom?

[uxbod]

Jetway JNC92

[fcash]

The reason I ask is I remember when I worked for the (then) largest ISP in the northwest in late 2000, they had 3 Sun servers for email doing round robin, running SunOS I believe, and I think they were only like 80 MHz with 512 MB RAM, but they handled email for 50,000 customers and only got slow when we got hit by massive spam storms (like millions at a time).

What *exactly* was that cluster doing, though? Was it just handling SMTP (doesn't take much juice for that, unless you are doing a lot of filtering)? Was it just POP3 (takes very little juice for that)? Was it doing IMAP (takes a bit more for that)? Was it also running a web interface?

Zimbra as just an MTA (no AV/AS, no IMAP, no POP, no HTTP, just plain SMTP) doesn't require a lot of CPU or RAM. As you add services, though, you need more power, especially if you are using the AJAX webclient.

My dedicated Zimbra NE server here at work supports 49 users, and it's got 4 GB RAM and a quad-core 64-bit CPU AND STILL runs quite slow at times... Amazing..

And, how much of the Zimbra stack is sitting on that single box? If you have everything (SMTP, AV/AS, LDAP, web server, logger, IMAP, etc) running on there, then what do you expect? The biggest thing with mail servers is disk I/O: if you can put fast disks in the box, or separate out the disk intensive bits onto separate boxes, then you can get away with less CPU/RAM.

[uxbod]

Bill, How are you getting on with your new toy ? Have you installed ZCS on it ?

[Bill Brock]

I am going to test their dependency and usability in a peer to peer environment in a couple of our branch offices before I decide to use them for mission critical services. I am very pleased so far with there performance. And if they can reduce energy consumption by appr. 25% over a regular tower, I think the boss will be pleased as well.