Scalable Transparent E-mail Outsourcing Services for Enterprises: Design and Benchmark

• Main Authors: Chun-Ming Chen, 陳尊明
• Other Authors: Ying-Dar Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/91042611237902922731

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊科學系 === 89 === This work presents a scalable transparent e-mail outsourcing service for enterprises. At present, most enterprises operate their own mail servers, where poor management often leads to malfunctioning. Thus, there is a strong need to outsource their e-mail servers. However, most free e-mail services, such as hotmail.com and Yahoo!mail, target at individuals instead of enterprises. Our system features transparent on-line outsourcing, friendly centralized front-end and back-end management, and a rich set of services, such as anti-virus and web mail, and can scale to millions of accounts and tens of thousands of enterprise domains. The system is driven by a scalable and reliable server cluster built from open source SMTP, POP3/IMAP, LDAP, relay, anti-virus, and mail data servers. Through internal benchmark, we identify bottlenecks and apply resolutions such as splitting the mail queue to multiple disks, limiting the size of queue directory, and moving some metadata to the Reiser file system which has fast directory lookup. We demonstrate that the tuned system can achieve 1000 messages per second under a 14-node cluster, outperforming another reported system which requires a 20-node cluster to achieve the same throughput.