Message Systems eNewsletter Issue 2 2007 - The Benefits of Clustering

Proud Sponsors of

Join us at the
Authentication and Online Trust Summit 2007 (AOTA 07)

April 18-19, Boston Sheraton
Message Systems is proud to be an Industry Underwriter for this intensive two-day program focused on online authentication, identity and reputation sponsored by the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance.

The Benefits of Clustering

by Alec Peterson, Director of Product Development, Message Systems

Benefits of Clustering An email solution that runs in a clustered configuration has several advantages over a traditional environment. Overall, clustering makes server configuration and management easier and less costly, while ensuring all servers are configured the same simultaneously. It also provides automatic failover to ensure delivery continuity as well as an easy way to retrieve data from servers for timely reporting and analysis.

Single-point Configuration and Management — Clustering allows multiple servers to work as a single system, all managed from a single administration console to enable single-point cluster configuration and management. Senders can create a master configuration on the cluster manager that is then pushed to all nodes in the cluster. This updates each server at the same time to ensure configuration consistency. For exceptions, automatic overrides can be created and acquired at startup for individual nodes.

Quality of Service — Clustered metrics allow an administrator to enforce quality of service across an entire cluster instead of on a per-node basis. For example, without clustering a sender would have to divide the limit by the number of nodes to enforce a connection limit to a specific domain. Using a cluster manager, senders can set connection limits for the cluster as a whole and individual nodes will take each other into account to maintain the cluster-wide limit.

Proactive Threat Protection — Cluster-wide enforcement of connection metrics and traffic-shaping rules dynamically blocks threats from attackers distributing an attack across MTAs on the network. With the availability of consolidated logs, abuse managers have a full view of the enterprise and can quickly identify and address emerging threats.

High Availability — For senders who need to maintain service levels in a mission-critical environment, clustering provides a high-availability environment with dynamic node failover in the event that a server fails or is taken offline. Even if multiple nodes fail, the remaining servers will immediately take over to handle the incoming IP addresses and queues of the failed node(s) to ensure continued operation.

Timely Analysis and Reporting — To aid in analysis and reporting, clustering provides for a logging architecture that can aggregate and display logs from each cluster node to a central cluster manager, providing valuable deliverability statistics on demand instead of waiting days to manually collect and compile the data. This timely information can then be used to make adjustments that will have an immediate positive impact on the deliverability success rate of subsequent mailings.

Alec Peterson, Director of Product Development

Alec Peterson Alec joined Message Systems in February 2006, serving as the product manager for the Message Systems MTA, and is responsible for shaping and guiding Message Systems to ensure that it continues to be the fastest and most flexible MTA in the world. Before Message Systems, he was a founder and product lead for Catbird Networks, an internet security company based in Chicago. In addition, Alec was also a founder of UltraDNS, a leading provider of outsourced DNS services to enterprises and service providers. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied in the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems.