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Choosing a Replacement Email System For a University?
SmarkWoW writes "The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We're looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?"
Are you from Microsoft? Yes? Well thank you for your time.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
Google: least harm
microsoft: most lock-in
Yahoo!: possible lock-in
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Verizon. I hear they do wonders when it comes to email security.
Make Sure the Calendar system also Verifies that there are no overlapping so that way a student can get a copy of their Class Schedule. Another thing that would be nice is to see what kind of programing APIs they offer for you to allow the Staff/Students to add links to things for specific classes like notes/MP3 recordings/Handouts, and allow them to future proof their systems.
We use a combination of Squirrelmail and some homebrew imap and smtp servers, which ultimately are going to be tied in to a Shibboleth SSO solution.
Most of our systems are homebrew and rely on cron jobs to update the AD (or the mysql db with an AD dump .. i'm not sure which way round it goes these days)
If you've always used out of the box software then outsourcing your services is probably the best idea, even if it would be more cost-effective to hire a couple of beardy unwashed hackers for a few months to put something together and keep one on for long term support.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
Questions that are tailored to your specific needs. Things about ease of administration, scaling, storage space, etc. I don't see that there are any general questions to be asked that aren't painfully obvious. The questioner didn't even specify whether the software was running on their own servers or on Yagoosoft's servers (I'm guessing the latter, since I haven't heard of a yahoo on-site solution). In the end, only you know what's most important to the university and, therefore, the things you need to ask about.
You may end up w/ an in-house system.
Let your CS dept run it.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
...a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs.
I can see where this is going already. Enjoy your Exchange server farm.
Protip: Don't let your IT department work with anything sharp. That way they can't kill themselves.
Hi there
first how do I backup the system ?
( what your really asking is if your software system fails and it will all systems fail (e.g. gmail outage for a day) how quickly can I recover?)
we get attacked by a certain type of worm can I insert a rule into everyones policy to get rid of that ?
(its been delivered the filters did not catch it I want to reach in and take it away)
how do i get a log and bodies of the email sent out of the system for legal ?
how do I control the sending policy ?
(I dont want just anyone sending mail on behalf of my domain some people i want to restrict to only email inside the domain )
how can I add all the address's before people arrive ?
how does it work with mobiles ?
there's a start
regards
john jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
disclaimer : I work in groupware but for a different vender my blog reflects this
I work for a small-ish university in Canada and we run our own mail systems. With the proper software and expertise it's not that difficult to do.
Is there some reason that you're looking at external vendors? Not enough staff? Not enough internal expertise with email? Cost? Something else?
If you did decide to host it yourself, you could go the traditional route with a Unix-based mailserver, and something like Horde's IMP for Webmail. Or you could look at something like Zimbra, which has all your mail basics plus extra goodness like calendaring built-in.
As for who I would go with from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - as a former sysadmin I would avoid Microsoft. This isn't because I'm some kind of Unix bigot - it's because in my experience they tend to oversell the capabilities of their products ... the true limitations of which you discover after the deal has been signed.
That may have just been the reps we had back in Ottawa, but YMMV.
If the university requires/forces students to use their .edu email account, then I feel that having the hardware and service on-site is a bare minimum. A lot of private information can _sometimes_ be required. So the organization requiring the use of the email account should be directly responsible as much as possible.
On a side note have secure SMTP and IMAP is a big deal for me. I know Microsoft tends not to offer IMAP support for their new, Live (offsite) service. So Microsoft's Live Mail service has two big NO-NOs for me.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I would be be asking either of these rep's is what service integrates best with your existing student directory service(AD, OpenLDAP eDirectory etc), and how do they go about managing mass account creation, recipient policies, group membership.
Its one thing to bring in a new mail service, but ongoing management and maintenance of users and mailboxes, it and how it interacts with other internal systems would be the most important thing to me from an administrative point of view.
The most important : support both POPS and IMAPS, as well as SMTPS.
There is no reason not supporting this in any system deployed in the 90's or later.
A good webmail such as gmail (and not like outlook web access) is also worth considering.
I would be concerned about the privacy implications of using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or GMail for your student and faculty email. Now, granted, a lot of college students will be using one of those three for their personal email accounts *anyhow*, but for faculty in particular, and even some students, there could be some real downsides to using a third-party email provider.
For example, I don't know what Uni you're from, but a lot of Universities have faculty and students who are involved in research which might be of a nature where it might not be good to have them sending emails through a third-party. For example, professors and/or students working on Defense dept, Energy department, or CIA/NSA research (although, it might be that in such a situation, they would be using a more secure email system run by the government agency they are collaborating with, instead of the University email, anyhow, so maybe that's not such a concern).
Still, in general, I don't like the privacy implications of using Yahoo, Microsoft, or GMail for university email systems.
You might ask the representatives what guarantees of privacy they are willing to make to the University and it's students, faculty, and staff. I think I would hold them to a higher standard than what the normal Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail privacy statements offer.
I certainly hope you are not leaving the students out of the loop, for they are your customers after all. Let them know what is on the table and discuss it with them. Their input could be valuable in many unseen ways.
The university I am attending here in the US is using gmail, but it is renamed and using a .edu address. I like it much better than other accounts I have had from other providers (Yahoo, MS, ect). It is much easier to filter/manipulate/read than the others, and also better at filtering spam. 99.9% of the spam I have gotten is from the school and always labeled "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT" in the subject (I'm looking at YOU, ETSU, for spamming crap that is not important to students). Anything with those two words goes straight to the shit pile...
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
The "problem" that seems to plague all email systems is that they wind up being used as a replacement for a non-existing network file system. Users share ten's to hundred's of copies of the same word file. (If you think hundred's is hyperbole, the administration at the community college broadcasts announcements and then the group admins re-broadcasts the same.) No one deletes email because they cannot save/retrieve files as they move from one computer to another. Before picking an email system, pick a network file system with portable home directories.
Take a look at PostPath. Email is only one piece of the system as you are looking at your communication needs. Don't overlook the integration with other collaboration products. Needless to say, I think a system should have lots of openness but also many of the features that our new students are demanding. Think VoIP, Mobility, Video Mail, Blogging tools, Video conferencing, and online collaboration tools I guess similar to WebEX or others. Put this all in a comprehensive manageable system, that gives them things they want to use. Good luck.
The university in question will NOT be dumping a load of cash on this, and in fact will probably be saving some. Microsoft. Yahoo and Google all provide this free of charge to Universities - in exchange for getting their stuff and services used by a new bunch of students each and every year, some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate. In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service.
Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else.
Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up. You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
My workplace outsourced student mail to one of the larger players, over my initial objections, but I have to admit that overall it seems to be working out quite well.
You need a professional IT staff with real experience with LDAP and Novell Groupwise. If you are a big university, don't fuck around with Exchange. Universities have serious IT Needs and require elite administrators.
I looked over a contract between Google and a large university and found it to be very dangerous to the intellectual property rights of the university and to the privacy rights of students, faculty, and staff.
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus, cause a patent application to fail because of an excessive time lapse between publication and the application. It is necessary to bring the provider into the tent of protection so that patent rights are not harmed.
And in these days of litigation, consider who will get subpoenas, the university or the provider, and who will get notice in time to go to court to contest the delivery of the materials.
The terms in some of these contracts make the provider the copyright owner, or at least give a perpetual non-revocable license to the provider, even beyond the lifetime of the agreement. That can lead to some rather unhappy faculty who find that their publications, and their notes and discussions, have been licensed away, forever.
Also consider whether the university can get the email back at the end of the contract. There is a good chance that it will not be able to do so.
And consider whether you think it is a good idea for students, who tend to experiment with life's options, to begin to build a lifelong dossier that contains their university life emails.
The number of issues of this type is huge and most university lawyers are either not equipped to comprehend them or don't care to do so.
Most people I know who have deeply considered these things tend to find it a really bad idea to outsource university email without very, very strong contractual protections that think through the issues of now and the issues that might arise in the future, particularly when the university wants to terminate the agreement or move to another provider.
If they don't give you a blank stare, you might have a viable vendor. It's like a tech vendor selling to a hospital needs to know what HIPAA is.
I work at the ITEE school at my uni, and our tech section was running Horde for our email server. It was superb. Alas, orders came from above that they wished to centralise the email servers and we got stuck on Exchange. It's crap compared to what we had. The web client is rubbish, and the mail server is dog slow.
I'd go with the above suggestion if you have the choice. Second choice, I'd probably recommend Google.
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
If your university is going to rely on one of those 3 companies for something as critical as email, one has to wonder whether your computer related faculty and staff are really up to the task of teaching about modern technology. Seriously, setting up a proper instance of something like Zimbra is not that big a deal.
It's the University of Washington.
The former IT management (now gone, after losing $40million) decided to set up an Exchange server for everybody because UW's president wanted one for his Blackberry. Later, they discovered that it was too expensive to offer Exchange to all the students, and they decided to tell the students to use Gmail or Live@Edu.
Faculty and staff who've been migrated to Exchange hate it. Many have asked to get back onto the IMAP servers.
There's nothing wrong with those servers. They got a major hardware and software upgrade last year. However, all the people who worked on those servers were laid off last May, and have found new jobs. The few people still there are quite demoralized and have been deserting the sinking ship.
So they're stuck with The Plan, even as the magnitude of its idiocy becomes clear.
Forget all that junk. Use the Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/ system. I must warn you; it's a proprietary system.
Does your service support encrypted protocols?
Does your service support a standards based access for sending and receiving email (IMAP, POP3, SMTP)?
Hint: only GMail supports these two crucial features.
ok well no I am not as wise as you !
seriously
first i would maybe give them a call or send them a support email asking exactly why this is the case and then if the service is not satisfactory i would move my email storage to a different place stop paying them and put a default filter to forward the email to my new address
update all my contacts with my new address indicating the problem
you can vote with your feet and money...
that way corporations listen
regards
John Jones
If you go with Google, make sure their proposal has phone support for administrative accounts. Their service is wonderful, their support wanks. And I'd stand on that. No support, no deal. Which ever one you go with, make sure you have an exit strategy in writing. How they're going to help you transition, including message migration, if the relationship sours. I expect Google to have a good option there, don't know about the other two.
Half your students are probably already using Gmail anyway.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Until this fall, our university was maintaining one of, if not the largest, Cyrus mail system in the world. Over 50,000 mailboxes generating an average of 4,000,000 transactions a day (peaking at 5,000,000), hosted on a cluster of SunFire servers and StorEdge/StorageTek SAN. In-house, open-source...sounds great, right?
This year we estimated the cost of increasing our default inbox quota from a paltry 60 MB to 1 GB (a long-overdue upgrade). The total came in at about US$500,000, which is fiscally untenable at this point.
Then we were hit by a previously unknown ZFS bug that crippled mail delivery for almost a week while we worked with Carnegie Mellon, Sun and consultants trying to figure out why our system wasn't scaling properly.
We realized that sometimes outsourcing is the best alternative, no matter what in-house resources or requirements exist.
We just launched Google-hosted email for all students, which is projected to save $250,000 annually (or more if TCO is considered).
It was fun being the guinea-pig for scaling up Cyrus, but by partnering with Google we can deliver more reliable, larger inboxes and save money instead of spending it. DIY "let the CS department handle it" philosophies are great, but not always the best plan. Even for email, outsourcing can sometimes be the best option, not a cop out.
Clearly, his opinion is of no value and should receive no attention.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Zimbra works very well, if your not looking to outsource. (ask the Yahoo guys about it)
It can be run as a domain controller itself using OpenLDAP and Samba to do account authentication, and there are modules in Zimbra to allow it to do that.. So while you are replacing your mail server you can take the PDC out with it. :p
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
I work at a mid-sized community college. We are in the process of migrating our calendars, chat, and email to google (from iplanet/luminous). So far it is very promising and best of all basically free.
Not to mention our servers no longer get hit with incoming spam and we do not need to maintain a antivirus server to scan incoming email. Going exchange was way overboard cost wise, and going with zimbra proved to be MORE costly then exchange (go figure). Our requirements were to be able to use outlook for people who want to, have a great web UI, be usable from pda's, iphones, and other smart devices, and integrate well with our current web portal. Google met all those goals with easy.
That sucks. We've got 80,000 mailboxes here running cyrus, no quota. I think management still asks us to tell people we've got 2GB quotas despite the fact we haven't had quotas in 3 or 4 years. The usage pattern has been constant over the last few years, (except for the CS prof who had a 16GB mailbox because he liked to store files in mail). The reason we've been able to not use quotas is because disk is constantly getting cheaper.
We had to put quite a bit of work into cyrus to make it scale to this size reliably, but currently we run it with only 2 FTEs. One of the best features of the system we have is we replicate the data to 2 additional sites, so even if we lose an individual server ( there are 20 in each site) we'll be back online in less than 15 minutes.
I kinda wish all the tricks we have learned would get shared, but I dunno how much has made it back out into the community.
The other place where we save cash is essentially using commodity hardware instead of a SAN.
That said, if we hit a serious bug like that, I bet there would be a push to outsource. We've hit them before with cyrus, but not since any of the alternatives were available.
I guess about 5 years ago already my university switched to outlook web access. A very horrible interface and it was not possible to weave it in a useful way to the existing portal. I got the impression that microsoft is very good at offering one standard solution, not so much at even a slightest bit of customization.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I hope that Yahoo will push for a Zimbra implementation when they show up - it's not clear from your query, but I hope that we're not talking about just the fee-based versions of the web offerings from these three outfits.
Zimbra is full-featured - mail, calendaring, presence, and more; including things that college kids would take advantage of: mobile options. It's also extensible and flexible enough that it can be tied into many existing and disparate backend systems:
-tie it into your admissions or financials database and give administrators more flexibiltiy in processing paperwork
-tie it into twitter and facebook and other web2.0ey things to make the college kids share stuff easily
-tie it into stuff like Blackboard or whatever edcational software they use, so that kids can easily share (drag and drop) files from/to their classmates and teachers.
Oh, and it's pretty much standards-based, so if you decide later to move to something else, there's not really the issue of lock-in. How would you export your data from Gmail or the others if you had to move a few years down the road?
Other random questions: If these are to be hosted by the provider rather than by your school, do you have assurance that they won't datamine you to serve ads or other such tomfoolery? How long will they retain your data if you change providers? As for protection of the innocent, will they sell you out at the drop of an unsubstantiated dcma notice? If your grad students email each other about some new groundbreaking project they're working on, will it screw up their potential to file a patent later? Who "owns" the content of the messages?
That's my 2 cents. Please post back and let us know what they end up deciding on.
You were by far not the largest Cyrus installation. There are several installations with over 100K users. Cyrus is designed to scale horizontally (multiple small servers, each serving a portion of the users) rather than vertically (using very large servers to serve large numbers of users). The places which have the biggest problems with Cyrus tend to be those that run tens of thousands of users per server. Cyrus is far from perfect, but it can readily scale to very large installations.
Half a mil ? Really ? Let's see.
50,000 mailboxes, 1 GB each, let's overestimate and multiply this by 4 (2x for raid mirroring, 2x for a disk-based backup on a raid mirror), so you need about 200 TB of raw storage. 192 TB can be provided by 4 Thumpers (Sun Fire x4500, 4 rack units) with 48 1-TB disks each (pretty soon Sun will offer 1.5-TB disks), and the 4 of them fit in only 16 rack units.
Assuming you are getting ripped off by Sun, let's overestimate again and say you pay $1200/TB (raw disks are 10 TIMES cheaper: $120/TB). That's 192*1200 = $230k.
A Thumper is rated 1800W max, let's overestimate and say it actually does consume 1800W continuously and let's say you also waste 1800W on the A/C to cool 1 Thumper. So running and cooling the 4 Thumpers consumes 1800*2*4 = 14.4kW. At $.01kWh, running them 24/7 for 5 years would cost you 14.4*24*365.25*5*.01 = $6300.
Despite all this overestimations, the grand total is $230k + $6300 = $236k.
Half a mil you said ? I just saved you $500k-$236k = $264k :)
Three vendors? You must be new here; everyone else on this board only sees two! :D
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
1. How well does your email system work with non-Windows operating systems?
2. When a user is not running Windows, does he have access to full features?
3. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to search his mail?
4. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to download his mail in a seamless fashion without having to call IT for instructions?
5. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your best installations?
6. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your worst installations?
7. Why should we hire you?
8. Why should we hire your competitor?
9. When your system has failed in the past, what is your mean time to restoration of operation?
10. What is your worst time to restoration of operation?
11. What is your mean delivery time?
12. What is your mean delivery rate? If it is not above 99.99999% (seven 9s) provide details of the failures, and the protocols you have in place to track and correct them.
13. What is your archival plan?
14. What is your plan for retiring accounts?
15. What is your disaster recovery plan?
16. What is your tech support plan for our IT department?
17. What is your tech support plan for our users?
18. What is your training support plan for our admins?
19. How healthy is your company? Can we expect you to be in business for 5 years? 10? 20?
20. What happens to our data if you fail before our contract is up?
21. What happens to our data after our contract is up and you're still in business?
22. How recently has your system been broken in to? How long did it take you to detect it? And to respond? Is that typical of break-ins to your system?
23. What privacy and security controls to you have in place?
24. What would you do, or have you done, when faced with a subpoena for data on your users, who will be our students, faculty, and administrators?
25. What authority will you give or not give to our faculty and administrators over student data?
And that's just off the top of my head. Be sure to get the answers in writing.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Sounds more like you were a guinea-pig for ZFS, which maybe wasn't the super best choice for a filesystem to host Cyrus. I'm sure everyone else who now can use Cyrus with ZFS thanks you, but it definitely wasn't the most cluefull move. But hey, ZFS is neat-o, I can understand the attraction.
I have actual, direct experience with doing this at 2 different colleges. One used Google, the other used Microsoft. Google worked without a hitch and we had good, quick support and responses when asking questions. However, Google saw fit to remove some of the admin capabilities we felt we needed over our own student accounts, and refused to return them. Microsoft, at the other college, got an IP address change from us several months ago for our outbound bulk mailer for student information mailings. For some reason, they decided to update that in only one place, their firewalls I believe. It didn't get updated in their spam filter, and when we recently initiated some standard bulk email, their spam filter went nuts and blacklisted us! All outbound mail from faculty to students quit working! When we tried to get support, they indicated that the IP address we were using was a new one, and that it would take 5 days to get it into their systems..... we had to get this escalated by execs at our end, with copies of the email notifications to them from months ago. They finally agreed that it was a lapse on their part, but we still had 2 full days of downtime. So, if I were you, I would ask about an SLA, and about the administrative capabilities you feel you need to provide the level of service you wish for your students. On a side note, no way I'd go with Yahoo. If I had my druthers, I'd move the current Microsoft setup to Google, because Google escalation works much better.
I'm going to toss an oar in the water because I'm deploying Zimbra for my company to replace (please, put your beverage down) Exchange 5.5 on Win2k with an NT4 PDC.
Ok, now that you're done laughing...
Zimbra is, to use the words Jerry Pournelle once used to describe Vulcan (dBase I), "infuriatingly excellent".
Within the current limts of AJAX, it's web client program is very nice indeed; they have a detachable client but I haven't played with it yet.
The system runs atop a lotta buncha FOSS packages, though it brings them all along with it, which means you really want to dedicate a box/VM to running it -- this is a feature, though, not a bug. Why? Because it means that *they* worry about upstream security bugs, not you.
It does POP/SSL and IMAP/SSL, and the webclient itself can be locked to only run SSL, if you like. It has a very nice multi-domain admin control panel, the commercial version will do hot backups and connect to Outlook, and there's a Migration Wizard to pull mail, contacts and calendars out of Exchange Server.
That said, we now proceed to the infuriating part.
There are lots of things that I (having been a mail admin for 10 or 15 years, and moving about 500 real messages a day over 15 mailing lists) think it ought to do that it doesn't.
The two most fundamental are that it doesn't thread on In-Reply-To but on message title, and that it doesn't handle mailing list traffic too well. The former is Broken As Designed: there has been a bug on their (open) Bugzilla about this since v3.mumble; they just shipped 5.0.10, but no progress on the bug, no official comment, and they decline to *close* the damned bug as well -- I think that this falls in the category of "keeping all your nuts in one basket".
On the latter front, there are "next unread" and "previous unread" keys, but since they paginate their message list (for reasons that I publically assume have to do with shitty AJAX toolkits and no one disagrees with me), it would be nice, you'd think, if those went *over* the edges of pages; they don't. Since that's true, you have to read your mailing list mail backwards -- since there's no practical way to get to the *beginning* of the new traffic in the folder if you sort forwards.
There are other foibles, but perhaps business (and *maybe* college) users wouldn't notice them; they're largely the result of growing up on Mutt.
Mutt definitely sucks less than Zimbra; I haven't filed 36 bugs on Mutt.
Go into it with your eyes open, certainly, but for all that I'm personally annoyed with it, Zimbra has some good things to recommend it.
John Holder, Mike Morse, and a couple of the other staffers who frequent their forum are pretty good guys.
And in the last month, denizens thereof have rolled out 22K and 47.5K mailbox installs. So clearly it scales. Will you have to learn some things? Yes. Well it be perfect, and roll out to a college sized install with no problems whatever? Well, maybe, but I'd plan for a *few* annoyances.
Should you ignore it?
Only at your peril.
Outside hosting is, as has already been noted, extremely fraught with legal landmines.
And this month has, I think, displayed quite nicely the risks of failing to heed warnings.
Yes it is reasonable to run 4 Thumpers with 1-TB drives. Read the OpenSolaris ZFS mailing list, some people are doing just that.
You are wrong when you say "the number of concurrent users queued up against reads & writes on a given spindle goes way up". Previous situation: 1666 mailbox/drive (60 MB quota, assuming 100-GB drives). With 4 Thumpers: 1000 mailbox/drive (1 GB quota, 1-TB drives). That's actually lower !
Buying/configuring/administering 4 Thumpers for 5 years probably cost $10-20k in people, tops. Maybe as low as $5k if your company is efficient and not full of red-tape crap, such as a startup. A friend of mine (working for one, precisely) just bought a Thumper. He spent a few hours on the phone with Sun negotiating a good price, bought one with the smallest drives, 250 GB, and replaced them with 1-TB ones he bought himself at $130 piece (he wouldn't accept Sun's price of $1000+/TB), this saved him more than $20k. Anyway he expects to spend a week or 2 fine-tuning it, then once in prod maybe he will get a drive failure every other month or so. This is an example where a Thumper is clearly not going to cost much more than $5k in people.
"Then you have to deal with tape backup systems (which usually cost 2-3x the storage cost per unit)" Tape is dead. Tape is being replaced with disk. Part of the reason is precisely because, as you said (!) it costs 2-3x more than disk. (At least we agree on something). Read my original post, I already accounted for a disk-based backup system in my numbers.
As a footnote, some startups do deal with 100k users or more. Hotmail (on-topic, isn't it) had 100k subscribers 3 months after the site launched (source: Founder at Works, quote from Sabeer Bhatia, cofounder of Hotmail).