Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

On Dec 27, 2004, at 9:40 AM, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:

> If you're talking about DISK space, then (again) I claim that the 
> amount of disk
> space (at today's prices) is ridiculously cheap, not worth talking 
> about in the
> overall scheme of things.
A large mail system is very heavy on reads AND writes, so while disk 
space may be cheap, a system that supports actual use of that space is 
very expensive. The larger disks get, the harder and harder it gets to 
use all of the space on them. Very often you can't.
>   (Even the FREE ISPs are giving from 250Mb, 500Mb, or
> 1Gb of disk space for E-mail messages... even with mirroring, that's 
> no more
> than a dollar or so per user, which is NOT a significant percentage of 
> the total
> ISP operating costs.
The reason that these large quotas can be supported is not because of 
low storage costs, but because it's only a small subset of users that 
end up utilizing that kind of space. This trend will probably change 
over time as users become more savvy, but right now these power users 
are the minority. I am sure that anyone that offers this kind of space 
has done very careful study of disk usage patterns among their customer 
base. If all of their users suddenly decided to start using all of that 
space the result would likely be disastrous.
There is also the cost of maintenance for such a large disk farm, which 
requires skilled staff and good organization. Money saved on a cheap 
system comes back to haunt you when a single disk rebuild ends up 
taking most of a work day, extending the window where the dreaded 
double disk failure can occur. Not to mention the degraded performance 
that can be suffered with a rebuild on a busy system.
So, in the context of a mail system for sizable ISP, I would claim that 
storage is anything but cheap.
Peter


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