Hello,
Currently have SM 15.5 on a Windows 2012R2 Standard bare metal raid 10 15k scsi drives. Single 3.5Ghz CPU and 8 RAM Everything has been running fine for 4 years now. We had about 50 domain with 600 emails and migrated our last users from our older IpSwitch email server with our finished total 55 domains, 800 users. Things seem fine still. 50% POP, 25% IMAP, 25% Webmail. Memory never about 33%, Smartermail memory typically was 500-650MB now about 700-800MB running smooth. Server Disk Space Used by SM = 210GB
Disk Queue was 0-1% | Daily Delivered: 10K | Local Delivered :8K | Remove Delivered : 2K
Some of our business users do send large attachments quite often to each other 15MB to their team members.
I expect all numbers above to be similar next year with a 10% growth on disk usage. We are using Spam Experts and only allow those IP's for inbound traffic.
IBM is replacing our other older server and I have a choice of OS and any 4 drives. I was thinking either Windows 2016 or Windows 2019 with the SM 15.5 (same version transfer) then possibly upgrade to SM 17. I haven't updated since ours has been running well - basically no calls and have been watching the forums.
Should I stick with the Raid 10 SCSI 15K drives 600GB or is the upgrade to 800GB SDD for $60 more a month worth it. This was the quote below for the replacement they have to supply. It's already a huge upgrade?
Server: Dual Intel Xeon Silver 4110 (16 Cores, 2.10 GHz)
Second Processor: Intel Xeon Silver 4110 (16 Cores, 2.10 GHz)
Operating System: Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition (64 bit)
RAM: 32 GB RAM
Disk Controller: RAID
First Hard Drive: 600 GB SAS (15K RPM)
Second Hard Drive : 600 GB SAS (15K RPM)
Third Hard Drive : 600 GB SAS (15K RPM)
Fourth Hard Drive : 600 GB SAS (15K RPM)
Uplink Port Speeds: 100 Mbps Public & Private Network Uplinks
Total = $233
w/800GB SSD = $293 (27% price increase)
My thought were the extra $60 could be spent on faster block storage backups if the difference is negligible or if raid SSD would be bottle necked.
Any recommendations on Server OS to use and Drives?
My main concern is will SM17 going to make me wish I had SSD or is this overkill? and would like to the most current Windows since it's likely this setup could last 10 years. We have quite a few users with 2-6GB mailboxes. searching is fairly quick. moving 2GB of emails from the folder to another via Webmail I do see a progress bar sometime for maybe 10 seconds. on small searches, its instant.
The SCSI drives have been reliable over the past 15 year on both servers. I could do a raid 1 mix, but think staying Raid 10 is best. I'm looking for the best stable setup.