New Maia Implementation - Looking for some hardware advice

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> Hi we are a state college in Massachusetts and we are
in the process of 
> implementing Maia for filtering spam and viruses for
our campus. The box 
> will receive mail from our external MX which performs
recipient 
> validation, and blocks SPF “FAIL” queries. Mail that
passes the Maia 
> scan will then be forwarded to our Microsoft Exchange
system. We have 
> about 10,000 mailboxes and we have quite a large volume
of email and 
> spam on campus. I currently have a server speced out
for Maia, I was 
> wondering if the hardware on it is enough, whether we
need more 
> CPU/memory/hard drive space, or whether we are in gross
excess. We 
> speced out a Dell poweredge 2950 with 2 quad core Xeon
CPUs with 2.33 
> GHZ, and 8 GB of RAM with a 4 73 GB drives in a RAID 5.
We’re moving 
> from a commercial spam appliance. If anyone could give
me some advice on 
> this it’d be appreciated.

Do raid 10.  Raid 5 sucks for performance.  Raid 10 will
give you much 
better performance on both reads and writes.  I don't have
experience 
with that many mailboxes on one system, but I know if you go
with raid 
5, your hard drive performance will be a limiting factor. 
Even with 
raid 10, it may be the bottleneck in the operation.

Darrick

-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.c
om
_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

Thanks for the information, I'll make sure I look at that.
Would you say
that the CPU and Memory look acceptable or do you think it's
too
much/little. We want to make sure what we buy is enough (and
obviously
some space for expansion,) but at the same time we do not
want to spend
money needlessly and get way too much if we don't need to.

Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
Infrastructure Technician
Department of Information Technology
Westfield State College
Wilson 105-A
E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: Darrick Hartman (lists) [mailto:dhartmandjhsolutions.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:33 PM
To: Casartello, Thomas
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com; Blair, Alan
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for some
hardware advice

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> Hi we are a state college in Massachusetts and we are
in the process
of 
> implementing Maia for filtering spam and viruses for
our campus. The
box 
> will receive mail from our external MX which performs
recipient 
> validation, and blocks SPF "FAIL" queries.
Mail that passes the Maia 
> scan will then be forwarded to our Microsoft Exchange
system. We have 
> about 10,000 mailboxes and we have quite a large volume
of email and 
> spam on campus. I currently have a server speced out
for Maia, I was 
> wondering if the hardware on it is enough, whether we
need more 
> CPU/memory/hard drive space, or whether we are in gross
excess. We 
> speced out a Dell poweredge 2950 with 2 quad core Xeon
CPUs with 2.33 
> GHZ, and 8 GB of RAM with a 4 73 GB drives in a RAID 5.
We're moving 
> from a commercial spam appliance. If anyone could give
me some advice
on 
> this it'd be appreciated.

Do raid 10.  Raid 5 sucks for performance.  Raid 10 will
give you much 
better performance on both reads and writes.  I don't have
experience 
with that many mailboxes on one system, but I know if you go
with raid 
5, your hard drive performance will be a limiting factor. 
Even with 
raid 10, it may be the bottleneck in the operation.

Darrick

-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.c
om
_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

Thomas has made a post that I was thinking of doing. Compare
opinions with
users with medium/big installations.

In our company (a small  ISP) we are using 3 MM boxes and 1
SQL behind a
Alteon load balancer. We have about 12k mailboxes, with 500K
average
mails/day. Our servers are similar to Thomas server and are
more than enough
for our current situation.

We do a lot of spamassassin verifications, so the load in
the machines is a
little bit high in some parts of the day. Our mails spend
about 4-10 seconds
to be processed by our servers, which I believe is very good
(this fact is
very important for our customers, that demand quickness).

In this moment we are considering doing some more fine
tuning/changes to our
system and maybe a little more investment because of a new
project that can
grow to 150k mailboxes.

I would like to know if anyone has experience with so many
mailboxes. What
are the hardware requisites?

We are using Debian distro, but we are thinking about doing
some tests with
FreeBSD. Do you think that it will be faster?

Other thing that we are thinking is adopting a Greylist to
stop some of the
spam that enters the MM boxes and so decrease the load. We
are a bit
concerned because of the delay that can be caused.


Thank You
Joćo Carmona

-----Original Message-----
From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Casartello, Thomas
Sent: quinta-feira, 11 de Outubro de 2007 20:50
To: Darrick Hartman (lists)
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for somehardware
advice

Thanks for the information, I'll make sure I look at that.
Would you say
that the CPU and Memory look acceptable or do you think it's
too
much/little. We want to make sure what we buy is enough (and
obviously
some space for expansion,) but at the same time we do not
want to spend
money needlessly and get way too much if we don't need to.

Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
Infrastructure Technician
Department of Information Technology
Westfield State College
Wilson 105-A
E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: Darrick Hartman (lists) [mailto:dhartmandjhsolutions.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:33 PM
To: Casartello, Thomas
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com; Blair, Alan
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for some
hardware advice

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> Hi we are a state college in Massachusetts and we are
in the process
of 
> implementing Maia for filtering spam and viruses for
our campus. The
box 
> will receive mail from our external MX which performs
recipient 
> validation, and blocks SPF "FAIL" queries.
Mail that passes the Maia 
> scan will then be forwarded to our Microsoft Exchange
system. We have 
> about 10,000 mailboxes and we have quite a large volume
of email and 
> spam on campus. I currently have a server speced out
for Maia, I was 
> wondering if the hardware on it is enough, whether we
need more 
> CPU/memory/hard drive space, or whether we are in gross
excess. We 
> speced out a Dell poweredge 2950 with 2 quad core Xeon
CPUs with 2.33 
> GHZ, and 8 GB of RAM with a 4 73 GB drives in a RAID 5.
We're moving 
> from a commercial spam appliance. If anyone could give
me some advice
on 
> this it'd be appreciated.

Do raid 10.  Raid 5 sucks for performance.  Raid 10 will
give you much 
better performance on both reads and writes.  I don't have
experience 
with that many mailboxes on one system, but I know if you go
with raid 
5, your hard drive performance will be a limiting factor. 
Even with 
raid 10, it may be the bottleneck in the operation.

Darrick

-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.c
om
_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

We usually have about 70-75K messages per day. What is your
exact hardware that you have on those servers? I need to
make sure we can justify purchasing the server I mentioned.
We need to make sure we're not going overboard on the specs,
but at the same time make sure it's enough.

Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
Infrastructure Technician
Department of Information Technology
Westfield State College
Wilson 105-A
(413) 572-8245
E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Joćo Carmona
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:56 PM
To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for somehardwareadvice

Thomas has made a post that I was thinking of doing. Compare
opinions with
users with medium/big installations.

In our company (a small  ISP) we are using 3 MM boxes and 1
SQL behind a
Alteon load balancer. We have about 12k mailboxes, with 500K
average
mails/day. Our servers are similar to Thomas server and are
more than enough
for our current situation.

We do a lot of spamassassin verifications, so the load in
the machines is a
little bit high in some parts of the day. Our mails spend
about 4-10 seconds
to be processed by our servers, which I believe is very good
(this fact is
very important for our customers, that demand quickness).

In this moment we are considering doing some more fine
tuning/changes to our
system and maybe a little more investment because of a new
project that can
grow to 150k mailboxes.

I would like to know if anyone has experience with so many
mailboxes. What
are the hardware requisites?

We are using Debian distro, but we are thinking about doing
some tests with
FreeBSD. Do you think that it will be faster?

Other thing that we are thinking is adopting a Greylist to
stop some of the
spam that enters the MM boxes and so decrease the load. We
are a bit
concerned because of the delay that can be caused.


Thank You
Joćo Carmona

-----Original Message-----
From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Casartello, Thomas
Sent: quinta-feira, 11 de Outubro de 2007 20:50
To: Darrick Hartman (lists)
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for somehardware
advice

Thanks for the information, I'll make sure I look at that.
Would you say
that the CPU and Memory look acceptable or do you think it's
too
much/little. We want to make sure what we buy is enough (and
obviously
some space for expansion,) but at the same time we do not
want to spend
money needlessly and get way too much if we don't need to.

Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
Infrastructure Technician
Department of Information Technology
Westfield State College
Wilson 105-A
E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: Darrick Hartman (lists) [mailto:dhartmandjhsolutions.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:33 PM
To: Casartello, Thomas
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com; Blair, Alan
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking
for some
hardware advice

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> Hi we are a state college in Massachusetts and we are
in the process
of 
> implementing Maia for filtering spam and viruses for
our campus. The
box 
> will receive mail from our external MX which performs
recipient 
> validation, and blocks SPF "FAIL" queries.
Mail that passes the Maia 
> scan will then be forwarded to our Microsoft Exchange
system. We have 
> about 10,000 mailboxes and we have quite a large volume
of email and 
> spam on campus. I currently have a server speced out
for Maia, I was 
> wondering if the hardware on it is enough, whether we
need more 
> CPU/memory/hard drive space, or whether we are in gross
excess. We 
> speced out a Dell poweredge 2950 with 2 quad core Xeon
CPUs with 2.33 
> GHZ, and 8 GB of RAM with a 4 73 GB drives in a RAID 5.
We're moving 
> from a commercial spam appliance. If anyone could give
me some advice
on 
> this it'd be appreciated.

Do raid 10.  Raid 5 sucks for performance.  Raid 10 will
give you much 
better performance on both reads and writes.  I don't have
experience 
with that many mailboxes on one system, but I know if you go
with raid 
5, your hard drive performance will be a limiting factor. 
Even with 
raid 10, it may be the bottleneck in the operation.

Darrick

-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.c
om
_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users
_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


On Oct 11, 2007, at 6:55 PM, Joćo Carmona wrote:

>
> Other thing that we are thinking is adopting a Greylist
to stop  
> some of the
> spam that enters the MM boxes and so decrease the load.
We are a bit
> concerned because of the delay that can be caused.

Use sqlgrey ... it has some auto whitelisting features that
whitelist  
known good sender/recipient/IP tuples ... this makes it so
that  
communication between frequent conversationists is not
delayed much  
at all.   And the new ones that are greylisted are usually
there in  
15 minutes.   In all of my installations, it has been very 

successful, and greatly reduces load on the rest of the
system.  I've  
had maybe 2 complaints, but when we deactivated the
greylisting, they  
called back within a day pleading for it to be turned back
on.  ;)

David Morton
Maia Mailguard http://www.maiamailguard
.com
mortondadgrmm.net



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