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."

Comments

I always thought gamers drove performance.

[mikeophile]

Turns out it's really spammers.

Not that great

[Matts]

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.

Re:Not that great

[antic]

Probably worth noting that the Louis Gray who submitted this story is BlueArc's Corporate Communications Manager.

I thought that the blurb seemed a bit too slick to have come from anywhere but the company themselves. I hope there's no dodgy reason that Louis used a mac.com email address to submit the story instead of their work account.

Re:Redundant?

[saider]

I did a little "reliability analysis" for some telecom equipment a while ago, so I am semi-informed (not a guru).

There are two terms that often get interchanged, when they shouldn't. Reliability is the ability of the system to run without repairs. Availability is the ability of the system to do its job.

So the large monolithic system can be built out of very good (and expensive) components that do not fail as much as commodity hardware. This will lead to fewer failures and better reliability.

The commodity hardware can be arranged so that redundancy ensures that if on component fails, then another will take its load. Since the damaged component needs to be serviced, the reliability is lower, although the availiability of the system is the same.

Reliability is used by planners to determine the labor costs in keeping a system running. Availability is used by planners to make uptime predictions and to take measures to provide a certian level of service.

Two similiar numbers that are used for different purposes.

The tester responds...

[thomtunes]

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