Over the past few months we have dedicated much time towards boosting uptime. This would be done, by building redundancy around every hardware and software component that can fail. This, manifestly, holds true even for the mail storage boxes. We decided to invest in building a huge storage capacity (upwards of 18 TB raw storage) and lightning fast IO responses by using tiered storage ( a mix of SSDs and slow SATA discs).

Where does the redundancy come from ?
Currently deployed in an Active-Passive set up where mail data is re-synced to the slave regularly. So if we want to take a box down, we switch over to the slave, without any service downtown. We are also almost ready with our clustered filesystem implementation which could theoretically make this set up active in the next 3 to 4 weeks. The net result, your email will never go down.

Once this set up is successfully deployed in production (hopefully in 3-4 weeks), we’ll migrate accounts from the older infrastructure to the new one. Get ready for at least a 10 fold performance improvement once you move to the new set up. We are all excited to go live on this. Just waiting for our tech team to weave their magic.

We also have a team of techies busy automating the migration process. The cool part is that we’ve minimized the downtime required for the migrations to ensure you won’t even notice that your mail server has moved to this new infrastructure.
It is going to be an exciting couple of weeks for us and hopefully this manifests into rock solid email services for your organization.