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Intel and BlueArc Set New Mail Server Record
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."
Turns out it's really spammers.
Constructing templated emails and blasting them out to multiple servers doesn't require a full mail server.
They are better using customised software which doesn't care about inbound mail.
liqbase
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.
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.
I didn't even know there was a SPECmail, but this figure doesn't seem too outstanding to me.
;-)
Firstly I assume this is just a raw delivery setup - no spam or virus filtering. You'd be amazed how much of a difference this makes to any real world setup.
Secondly, apache.org does over 2 million mails a day on a dual 2.4Ghz Xeon using an SMTP server written in Perl. And that's with full anti-virus (clamav) and lots of different anti-spam measures including SpamAssassin (which is known to be slow - I know because I used to be one of the developers).
I also know of commercial setups doing over 50m (legit, well - mostly) mails a day. Using an SMTP Server designed with performance in mind. Perhaps they should submit for SPECmail
So 30 million doesn't seem terribly amazing to me. Perhaps Communigate Pro isn't a very fast mail server.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
...imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
*sigh*
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Interestingly enough, they set their record using a message store mounted on NFS. It had 140 FC/AL attached disks, and 14Gb of RAM.
Virtually every file handle an MTA writes to is opened "O_SYNC". One of the quickest ways to make Sendmail or other common MTA's go fast is to mount their delivery queues on a solid state disk. I'm betting this disk array is turning around the queues without ever committing the data to the platters. (Not that there's anything wrong with this...) I am left wondering if there isn't some bit if NFS trickery not reported in the config.
But looking at the Sun entry, the old record was set using 2 year old software, and a much smaller disk configuration. Sun will probably update their entry in the near future, just to reclaim the crown. Email is much more an I/O problem than a CPU problem. Sun used to push their mail server on much larger HW, but most ISP's don't want to buy big boxes these days. The small to medium sized boxes, connected to a SAN are more cost effective, permit redundancy and easier maintenance.
Just thought I'd add a few details and address some of the questions here. My name is Thom O'Connor and work for CommuniGate Systems (CGS), and was the one who put together and ran these tests - you can (mostly) verify this by looking at the comments in the source on the results page.
First off, on the SPECmail test itself. SPECmail is a standardized test (the only one I'm aware of for email) that attempts to closely regulate a level playing field for measuring email performance. It is critical to understand that this is not just measuring SMTP. The 30 million message a day text is a little vague, but it is important that this includes a distribution of delivery, relayed, and retrieved email. Sure, anyone can just relay many millions of messages an hour.
SPECmail does POP and SMTP, so the test measures not just MTA behaviour but also local delivery and then retrieval of the messages. The SPECmail test also uses Quality of Service (QOS) measurements such that a message injected via SMTP to the system MTAs (the CommuniGate Pro Frontend servers in this diagram) must then be delivered locally into the users' account, then be retrieved within 60 seconds. Satisfying the QOS criteria during the benchmark is often the most difficult part.
So, SPECmail itself just does POP and SMTP, which is a little 1990s I agree, but SPEC is coming out with a SPECimap test in the near future, and CGS is also very interested in seeing a SPEC VoIP/SIP test for measuring CommuniGate Pro's Real-Time capabilities.
A few others questions I've seen raised here:
1. The CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster described in this test is fully and completely appropriate for production use in all aspects. In fact, if you're running a 2+ million user ISP on a CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster, we'd recommend you to use these results as a guide for your architecture (although load balancers should be added to the gateway point for all inbound connections). In fact, CGS has ISP customers running architectures which match the layout of the described system almost exactly. All systems in the Cluster service all accounts - you could lose 4 Frontend Servers and 3 Backend Servers, and all users could still access their email (albeit with decreased capacity).
2. HyperThreading was disabled in the BIOS because the downloadable Solaris 10 x86 operating system would not (yet?) support the Intel x86_64 Potomoc chipset properly. That said, on top of the recent security vulnerabilities on the topic, we have also discovered miscellaneous threading and even NFS issues related to having HyperThreading enabled on Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 5.4, and Solaris 10 x86 systems.
3. On NFS...NFS is used safely and securely in this test. The integrity of data storage is one of the major criteria that the SPEC organization closely evaluates when reviewing a SPECmail submittal. Obviously, there are many ways to cheat and/or cut corners using Solid State Disks, unsafe RAM for message queueing, and other techniques that you would never want to use on your production message system. However, the test described here was performed using a standard (albeit excellent) BlueArc Titan Storage System with write caching only in NRRAM and using proper mount options and layout for security, redundancy, and data integrity.
Hope this clears up any misconceptions. Obviously, I'm clearly biased about the work here, but assembling and then passing a SPECmail test of this size is a gigantic effort. If anyone thinks