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 ;)

Comments

The mainframe's not dead...

[Jay Maynard]

This is the kind of thing that mainframes do well: information processing with little or no actual computation. Their I/O abilities really make the difference here.

Hopefully, this kind of result will show the skeptics that there's a real purpose for the big boxes.

Re:Sendmail's an MTA not a MUA

[kzinti]

Yeah, but read IBM's report of the "benchmark". (It was a 400,000-user test; the 2 million quoted in the articles is an extrapolation of that number.) The test performed was to measure the overall system load, not just that of Sendmail. The IBM writeup says that the simulated users were accessing their e-mail via POP clients. The point was to demonstrate the scalability of the whole system, Sendmail included.

--Jim

Re:1.2 Million dollars!

[Jay Maynard]

Image what I could build with 1.2 million in cheap clone hardware... I think I could do at least twice as much processing, and include the pop/imap servers.

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.