Hardware

[VBilly]

I am thinking about launching a box to run Scalix Community on to give it a try, and run some tests.

If I am happy with the end results I would want to just upgrade the license and continue using the same hardware that I have it installed on, so I want to make sure that I do install it on some quality hardware.

I have a local vendor that builds all of my machines and always have them custom built tot he job at hand. However since I have never worked with Scalix I have no idea about how powerful of hardware I need?

I have a few servers with Core2Duo's that are unoccupied currently. Do I need more power then that?

I will test with about 10 - 25 email addresses, however if I decide to move onto this box I will probably have upwards of 300 - 500 when testing is done and eventually more then that.

Though some users check from their phones, laptops etc. 24 x7 most will just pop their boxes once every 5 - 10 mins during business hours. Probably about 20 - 30% of users will use webmail.

Thanks in advance for your time and input.

-Billy

[kanderson]

Processors more or less won't matter. If it's a semi current processor (and a dual core definitely is) it'll have all the horsepower you need. I'd advise an AMD64 or an IA64 Processor so that you can run a 64bit version of Linux. This will allow you to address FAR more ram, and that will eventually matter.

Use LOTS of RAM. With 500 users, start with 4 Gig, go up from there if you can. POP and MAPI won't need much RAM, but Webmail will. Keep 2 Gigs for the OS, give the rest to Tomcat.

By far your most important requirement will be disk. You'll want 1+0 with a fast controller and lots of disks. POP won't require the space, but you'll want a very fast solution so that you get the speed. I'd recommend SCSI 15K drives. It is the fastest and the best especially when space doesn't matter, but SATA2 can work too. Don't use RAID 5. This will not be noticable at 25 users (or even 100). You WILL notice it at 500.

Save money on processors, and RAM, spend it on hard drives. Adding RAM later is easy. You could evaluate with 1G and add more before you take it to production.

Kev.