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Intel and BlueArc Set New Mail Server Record

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-will-need-one-just-for-my-spam dept.

louismg writes "With e-mail traffic continuing to explode, Intel and BlueArc announced this morning that the two companies have set a new SPECmail benchmark record in cooperation with CommuniGate Pro, offering a solution that can serve 30 million messages per day - 67% ahead of the previous record, owned by Sun Microsystems. Rather than clustering a lot of smaller servers together, large ISPs can now use fewer systems to handle massive traffic load."

7 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. The Aliens, there in it with the spammers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And if there was no spam, I doubt there would be such a need for these machines.

  2. Oh oh ..... by Ganniterix · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Looks like spammers have a new tool ...

  3. Redundant? by Puls4r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, not the post.

    Isn't part of the allure of smaller systems handling the specifically to get away from large dedicated systems that aren't nearly as reliable?

    By now, google should have taught the world something - distributed computing with small cheap specced systems that can each be swapped with multiple redundancy is the way to offer both uptime, speed, and be cost effective.

    It's nearly identical to the "lean" manufacturing techniques pioneered by the Japanese. Small cells that can increase or decrease output based on the amount of workers (systems) that are working that day. Very flexible.

    After all, it's a COMPUTER.... do you really want it dedicated to just email, or can we use it for other tasks in the downtime.

    1. Re:Redundant? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Isn't part of the allure of smaller systems handling the specifically to get away from large dedicated systems that aren't nearly as reliable?

      The allure of small systems is because of COST, not reliability. Large systems are and can be very reliable. Using consumer commodity computer parts by themselves is more likely to be less reliable, but if you set up failover clusters, then you get a cheaper overall system that is as reliable.

  4. Doesn't this create SPF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Using massive systems for handling mail invites a single point of failure (SPF), whereas using clusters of smaller systems for the same amount of money gives failover capability.

    Of course, ISPs won't realize this.

  5. Re:Not that great by Matts · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Replying to myself...

    So reading the full disclosure they used 4 quad xeons. That's 16 CPUs. Compared to apache.org's 2.

    So using a pure perl SMTPD you can have this kind of throughput (~1m mails per day per CPU) with spam and virus filtering enabled.

    No, I am not impressed with this benchmark.

    --

    Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
  6. Funny math. by Spazmania · · Score: 2, Insightful

    BlueArc's Titan sustained a performance level of 12,500 SPECmail messages per minute, or the equivalent of two and a half million SPECmail users, sending 30 million e-mail messages per day.

    The math seems a little off...

    12,500 messages/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 18M messages/day, not 30M.

    That having been said, CGPro is fast as all heck so I can believe it topped the previous record.

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