How many servers for 1000 users

[matthijsberg]

Hello!

I am a student and for my graduation I am calculating the TCO of sevaral linux environments. I would like to know some of you opinions on how to build a mail environment for 1000 users.

How many servers to use, what type of client to use (webbased, Thunderbird...anything else????) etc...

Hope you guys can help me out. I do wish to calculate using the Network Edition...

Many thanks in advance.

Kind regards,


Matthijs

[KevinH]

It depends on the profile of the users? Are they home users that get mail only a few times a day. Or are they heavy business user's are get hundreds of messages per day? Message sizes also matter. So we need more info to try and solve this.

[matthijsberg]

Thanks for your responce! But of cause you need more info.. sorry:

The focus is on a insurrance company, so that would implicate 1000 office users. The number of mails per day vary per user I guess, lets say avarage 50 mails a user a day would bring it up to 50.000 mails total a day? Also the calendar and the address book (GAL) wil be used a lot.

Many thanks

Matthijs

[KevinH]

Seems like a moderate busy server.. Off the top of my head I'd say you could get by with a modern (3.0GH+) dual CPU machine with 2GB RAM. Disk space would depend on how large of quota's you'd like to offer. If you get hit with lots of spam/virus mail you'll want to separate off the MTA/AV/AS and an LDAP replica to a separate front end node.

[matthijsberg]

Thanks a lot Kevin!