Internet Service Provider: E-Mail Infrastructure Redesign
Business Need: Replace an e-mail system suffering from limited scalability with a design horizontally scalable to hundreds of thousands of users.
Solution: A growing regional ISP used an e -mail infrastructure based on outdated technologies and a design that would not scale with the growth of the business. After researching the problem, Sine Nomine Associates created a solution that separates user accounts on a flexible number of mailbox servers, while a flexible number of inbound and outbound servers perform mail routing, virus and spam scanning, and POP/IMAP proxy routing. The new infrastructure s capacity can be increased without system disruption by adding more servers at any part of the mail stream. New features include webmail, web address books, and improved spam scanning relative to the previous system. The design extensively uses various Open Source software applications, saving the customer from increasing license fees. The system is in production for the ISP s entire customer base numbering in the tens of thousands of users, and handling millions of messages per day.