On Sat, 2005-04-16 at 07:46, Franki wrote:
After reviewing my needs, my budget, and the fact that the budget has to account for a mailserver, a DNS server as well as IDS and a heap of other hardware, I've decided that cost and data redundancy are the two big criteria I need to look at. I'll settle for just mirroring as long as it's hardware mirroring.
Note that software mirroring has some advantages too and is not a big performance hit as long as the underlying hardware uses DMA and works independently (i.e. don't do it with drives on the same IDE controller cable). I consider it a big plus to be able to take a drive from a mirrored pair, plug it into just about any computer without worrying about having exactly the same brand of controller, and recover the data - or take over the service the broken computer was providing.
And by the way, there's nothing wrong with running a DNS server and mail server on the same machine - but you should have a 2nd dns server which can also provide other services. You might need a bit more RAM but DNS typically is not a big cpu load.