The Dell R510 is now promoted to Best Box Ever, and the Sun X4540 is demoted to also-ran. Sun is now subsumed into a huge corporate entity that will not return your phone call unless you are one of the Fortune 500, and Dell finally has a PowerEdge with easy out of band management and an onboard RAID that is actually faster than the disks you can slap on it.

I wish I had saved some MRTG graphs, but the R510 has now replaced a decrepit 2-CPU, SATA based generic shitbox as the sole MTA and MUA for close to 10,000 users. Disk IO is 10X faster (the 2x12-core CPU probably 100X). The old box used to spike to load averages well above 100 whenever the Monday morning newsletter got sent out to all 10,000 recipients, or when some hapless user forwarded their entire inbox to Hotmail.

No more. I have yet to see the load average spike above 3. Flat-line. Everyone gets their email a few seconds after it's sent. Best Box Ever.

By the way we upgraded the MTA/MUA software, CommuniGate Pro, at the same time. If you have the bucks, buy it. It's isn't a nightmare to install and configure, like Sendmail or Postfix; support is excellent; it has a web browser interface for users too inept to install Thunderbird; and, unlike Exchange, is standards compliant and doesn't need a $5000 war chest of tools for backup and administration.

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