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Sendmail On IBM Mainframes Running GNU/Linux
raffe writes: "Cnet reports that Sendmail has released a version of its e-mail server software that can run on Linux-powered IBM mainframe computers. In one benchmark test, IBM found that it was possible to house 2 million e-mail accounts on a single server, with 10 percent of the users accessing their mail at any given moment" For some reason though, IBM zSeries machines aren't listed at pricewatch ;)
No end user can access their mail with Sendmail, it's a mail transfer agent for relaying mail, intra or inter-node.
Mail access means reading the end-user spool through the usual MUAs and support daemons: Pine, Elm, mail(1), imapd, pop, etc.
End users do use sendmail to relay mail, but they can't access their own mail that way.
Of course there are more important uses for the mainframe. There are mainframes slogging away daily in medium and large companies doing boring things like general ledger and payroll processing...the kind of unglamorous stuff that geeks turn their noses up at, at least until their paycheck doesn't arrive on time.
My point here is that the mainframe is also good at doing stuff like sendmail (or qmail, if you prefer). For the enterprise that has one (or several), carving off a logical partition to run Linux and handle the enterprise's email may well be a reason to keep it around instead of pushing it out the door and replacing it with a hundred NT boxes. Even sendmail is more secure than Exchange.
Who really cares? There are much better, cheaper machines for the job.
Give it a closer look. Quite aside from the cost of a high-end Sun or HP (priced an E10K lately?), study after study has shown that the mainframe provides better reliability at a lower total cost of ownership than Unix or NT systems that provide the same functionality.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
You certainly could buy a lot of hardware for that money, but who is going to want to admin 1.2 million worth of pc hardware all running in one cluster? You would also need a very large warehouse to store all of those boxes, and the power consumption would be a bitch too. In the long run you would be much better off with the mainframe if you really need that amount of processing power.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Then you get to maintain and run those thousand boxes. Consider power, floor space, and most importantly, people requirements. (Are you going to maintain those systems yourself? Two or three people, maybe? I don't think so.)
Sometimes you do get what you pay for.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!