[K12OSN] Emails for large districts

[Peter Scheie]

Check out www.real-time.com.  They are a 'Linux solutions provider' and 
offer things like large-scale email server setups.  I think they 
generally favor Postfix.  I talked with the president a year or two ago, 
as he described how in some cases they split the mail process over 
several machines for security and scalability.  He also delighted in 
telling how they setup their install server with the MAC addresses of 
each of the component machines, such that when they boot up, they are 
each fed an installation script that installs their respective 
components; they startup the server, turn on the client machines, and go 
to lunch; when they come back, everything is all setup and ready to go!

Anyway, they seem to know what they are doing, although I have not 
actually used their services professionally.  The company was started 
about ten years ago by a bunch of people from the local LUG.

And I agree with Jim, that you don't want to tackle this one on your 
own.  If the district is already looking at $250k pricetag, any decent 
Linux vendor should be able to beat that handily and still cover all the 
bases.

Peter

Todd O'Bryan wrote:
> Our district has about 16,000 employees of varying types and is
> currently using a web-based Exchange server to do email. The system is
> slow, clunky, and the database is getting full, so we've been told to
> clean out our mailboxes because they're going to delete all mail older
> than 30 days.
> 
> My question is this--does anyone have experience with a system that
> will scale reasonably to that many users. If so, we have about 90,000
> students. Know of a system that will scale that big? The head IT guy
> tells me that he was quoted a commercial cost of between $250k and
> $500k for a system that would handle us, and, while that doesn't
> surprise me, I think something effective could be done much more
> economically.
> 
> I'm just wondering if there's anything I can point to and say, see!
> 
> Todd
> 
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