GW Post Office Server Recommendation ...

Question

Hi everyone,
Need to decide on a new server platform for our primary Post Office, currently running GW 8 on NetWare but will move to Linux with this new hardware (bare metal install of SLES 11 sp2 with OES for NSS filesystem). Have the following choices:
Option A - HP Proliant DL380 G6, Qty 1-2.8GHz QC Xeon (X5560), 16GB RAM, Qty 4 600GB 15K SAS (raid 5), 512MB RAID cache
or
Option B - HP Proliant DL380 G6, Qty 2-2.5GHz QC Xeon (E5540), 16GB RAM, Qty 4 600GB 15K SAS (raid 5), 512MB RAID cache
As you can see, the only real difference is in the CPUs with one unit providing 4 cores but higher clock speed and the second unit providing 8 cores but slower clock speed. Now, given that a GW PO is disk intensive, I am wondering whether the CPU options here really make that much difference. And, is 8 cores overkill in this situation? Any thoughts? Thanks.

Answer 1

We are running our 3700 mailbox setup on a G7 version of this. You want more cores. Things like document conversion, webaccess, gwia, ... all can use additional cores. You neglected to mention the scale of your setup and what other agents you will be using.
Raid 5 = REALLY BAD. For that array, it can take days to rebuild, your disk performance will be horrendous, impacting service, and meanwhile if another drive fails you are hosed. Get more smaller disks and use RAID 1. A larger write cache on the controller is helpful. More memory is helpful. But it would be useful to know how big your setup is.
( Depending on how critical performance is, placing OFUSER and OFMSG on SSD will greatly increase performance as well as prevent the "rot" caused by fragmentation of the databases that occurs over time. We have about 1TB of e-mail, and about 100GB of databases. So a pair of 128 / 256 GB enterprise SSD will do it. Wear leveling and predictive on the HP will heep you out of any of the hypothetical troubles you may hear rumors bout when using SSD. )
-- Bob