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Infrastructure for One Million Email Accounts?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-have-good-spam-filters dept.

cfsmp3 asks: "I have been asked to define the infrastructure for the email system for a huge company, which fed up of Exchange, wants to replace their entire system with something non-Microsoft. I have done this before, but not for anything of this scale. Suppose you are given a chance to build from scratch an email system that has to support around one million accounts. Some corporate, some personal, some free. POP, IMAP, webmail, etc are requirements. The system must scale perfectly, 99.9% uptime is expected... where would you start?"

4 of 1,216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:go to gmail by Chmarr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Gmail is beta.

    Gmail does not have guaranteed uptime.

    You do not pin your companies communications system on something you cannot sign a SLA agreement with.

    need I go on? :)

  2. Re:Obviously by whackco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, I was going to use "Obviously" as my subject line... so I'll just respond to yours.

    I work with Exchange, and think that the chances are better that they just had shitty architecture to begin with. Exchange is a great platform and scales well, so if the original people wouldn't do it, well then f*ck em.

    Stilll convinced to migrate? Well, something with multiple datacenters, large scale, compressed SAN backend, and alot of clustering will do it. Shit, you could do the entire thing with MySQL if you REALLY wanted to. Moving the existing data over will be a huge pain no matter what you migrate to though.

    My suggestion? Don't just jump off Exchange, do a proper requirements analysis and you might find it is alot cheaper to just redesign the existing architecture.

  3. Easy by xihr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Resign. You're obviously in way over your head if you have to resort to asking Slashdot readers for advice like this.

  4. Re:Qmail!! by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A single server? For one million users?

    Insert "imagine a beowolf of those" joke here, except it isn't a joke.

    I think you might be underestimating the requirements for this large a project that "must scale perfectly". The "99.9% uptime is expected" requirement alone requires multiple internet connections, a large cluster of front end servers, and redundent database servers, preferably located in different states. (ie: "What do you mean our only server is in New Orleans?")

    I don't think the average Dell dual Xeon box is up to the task for this large a project...

    --
    Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!