Infrastructure Plans
by George RobertsJust a quick post to let you know some of the plans for our infrastructure as they stand right now. We’re open to thoughts and comments on these plans. We think they’re solid, but other sets of eys/thoughts may come up with something we haven’t thought of. 
We’re currently in the process of building out what we call our Edge, which is a multiple server cluster of servers which will handle RBL checking. The servers that make up this cluster are virtual instances that are part of a grid. We will be able to automatically add/remove instances to the grid as load requires. They will be accessed via DNS round robin to distribute load across the cluster. Messages that pass the RBL checks will be delivered to the appropriate MailFoundry appliance for additional checks. Messages that pass those checks will then be delivered to your mail server.
We’re also in the planning states of building out a Backup MX service, which will have MailFoundry appliances located at a separate datacenter facility and will be served by a second Edge cluster. This will be an add-on service, likely for $20-25 per month per ServerProtect account and $2-3 per DomainProtect account.
The primary Edge is up right now and we’re doing testing on it. We’ve still got some work to do on it, building some reporting tools for it as well as the monitoring and automatic scaling system. We don’t have a specific release date for it yet, but we’re hoping to have it ready for customer testing within the next few weeks. The backup Edge will be easy, since it will essentially be a duplicate of the primary with different targets for the MailFoundry appliances.
The Backup appliances and infrastructure are still being planned. We’re researching datacenters right now. We’re thinking it will be a couple of months before we’re ready to go with this service.
Any thoughts and ideas are welcome.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hello George,
Through our websites at http://www.oco.net and http://www.smartdatacenter.com we market our services for Level3 Communications Data Center Space.
We currently use your services to protect two of our email servers. If we can be of assistance in the Data Center search please let me know.
Brian Packham
Orange County Online, Inc.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:49 am
IMHO, the proposed price of Backup MX service is way to high. I think it should have to be in the range of 30% to 40% of the primary service price.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:55 am
We essentially have to almost duplicate our primary systems to be able to realistically handle load if we have to failover to the backup MX for some reason. Not sure how we could realistically do that at the percentages you’re talking about.