It’s been awhile since I’ve done any blogging on this site. In fact, it’s been awhile since I’ve done the work on spam free e-mail. Because of a combination of doing client work and some hardware problems it’s been difficult to actually do anything lately.
I’ve finally come close to a decision that before I can really launch spam free e-mail as a production service I need to purchase a significant amount of hardware to support it. While the hardware that I have right now is doing the job, and doing quite well, its reliability is something that I would not trust in a product that I want to sell to someone else.
I’m currently running the system of combination of a few Pentium III’s and a couple of Pentium IV’s which are working just fine. The problem area seems to be my storage solution.
I’m using an old snap server 12,000 that I picked up off of eBay which I had hoped would be stable enough to at least start the production service. In its current configuration I have nearly one half of terabyte of hard drive storage, which would be fine for the total amount of storage the real problem running into is speed and keeping the server online. I’ve been having problems with hard drives failing which seemed to be more a problem with the chassis then the drives.
I really don’t think the problem is with the choice of hardware by more than the actual device that I got off of eBay was being sold on eBay reason.
I have a few more things I can try on it before I completely give up, including trying out a completely different snap server 12,000 chassis that I have. Unfortunately I also purchased that one off of eBay and I’m not convinced that it will perform any better.
If and when I do finally decided that the snap servers will not perform well enough for a production service I’m going to be looking into purchasing a brand new snap server. I’ve been using snap servers in my own systems as well as for clients for many years and I believe they’re one of the best solutions to storage needs on the market and what they said my only complaint is that I believe the used ones that purchased from a performing as well as they could.
Of course, given the opportunity I would like to get new servers as well. I don’t see this as much of a stumbling block as the storage reliability requirements, since the servers are performing their job well where the storage system is failing on a very random basis. The only real reason to get new servers would be to speed up the amount of time that it takes to process each message which is currently between three and five seconds. Even with new servers I’m not sure how much faster it would be.