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8.4.x

Post Office Consolidation

Eddie,

Don't do it. It's a bad idea. Here are 4 major reasons applicable to traditional file sharing implementations of cc:Mail (not necessarily applicable to the cc:Web, POP3, and IMAP4 servers):

1. The message store is limited to 4GB. With 500 users, users will be limited to 8MB of data storage each. Typically, cc:Mail users have from 10MB to 30MB of message data. This suggests that no more than 250 users would be a practical limit for the number of users you could support on a given PO.

2. Larger POs can take much longer to repair when, not if, they are corrupted.

3. As the number of users increases, the number of users affected by corruptions also increases.

If you find, for example, that each of 10 POs get corrupted on average once every 100 days with an average of 1 hour down time, problematic; imagine how problematic it will be to have 1 PO 10 times larger that gets corrupted every 10 days and takes up to 10 hours to repair.

You might consider the above scenario absurd but it is a worst case that can in fact happen in the real world. The worst case I have seen is where a number of 200 user POs were corrupted more than once per week with an average repair time of 16-20 hours. I am not making this up.

This is critical because:

4a. As the number of users on a PO increases, server and network load increase. Generally, as server and network load increase, the probability of cc:Mail database corruption also increases. Of course this is a function of server, network, and workstation hardware and software.

4b. In theory, it is possible to have 500 or 1000 user post offices, however, in practice, server, network, and workstation issues usually make such configurations unreliable. The database can handle it but there are few corporate networks that can.

4c. Remember that the cc:Mail technology has the fundamental flaw of allowing user workstations to corrupt the post office. To solve this problem you must upgrade to a client/server system such as Lotus Notes and Domino.

So, think again. If you want improved centralization upgrade to a new technology: a client/server technology.

One last note, it is possible to build cc:Mail super servers. This is not theory. However, the model for this is many smaller POs on super-class file servers, and not mega-POs.

Finally, you can run more users per PO if you do NOT have any traditional LAN clients (accessing the PO via drive mappings), if you replace LAN clients with servers like cc:Web, POP3, and IMAP4. However, this does not resolve all of the issues

Ron

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Eddie Feng wrote:

>
> Hi all, how is everybody today? I wish you all have great new month and week
> ahead.
>
> There are 7 post offices in our agency. In the near future, top
management want
> to consolidate all the post office become one big post office. My
question are
>
> 1. Does DB8 post office can hold 500 users? how about mailing list
capacity, 500
> users is it OK or too much?
> 2. Is there a way to do the whole post office move at one time instead of
move
> one user at a time?
> 3. How do I move the internet address the users save on there personal
mailing
> list, do the import and export will do the job or not.
>
> I would appreciated the help from you all. I have been benefited from
this list
> a lot for the pass few years. Thanks for the help.