Large numbers are the order of the day in the world of the Internet, where many ISPs are feeling the teeth of the vicious circle that says you can only make money out of the Internet if you have the numbers; and because of the numbers and the competition you have to drop your prices. ISOCOR, a leading provider of heavy-duty mail and directory servers, recognised this trend some time ago and have focussed on producing servers that can cope with today`s (and tomorrow`s) demands.
The latest version of ISOCOR`s N-Plex Ultra SMTP server has been clocked at over 800 messages/second and is claimed to support literally millions of users. Dr Chris Crozier, a director of Cirrus-Techvue who are the ISOCOR suppliers in South Africa, says "Suppliers are always claiming biggest, fastest and best, but we believe ISOCOR can really substantiate their claim to the world`s fastest and most scalable message server. We have licensed over 20 million mailboxes, and in Europe, we have a single customer hosting over 800,000 mailboxes on a single distributed domain with 9 mail servers around the country. ISOCOR`s architecture allows all the users to be managed as if they were on a single server and to be moved between them at will, transparently to the user. That is one mail domain that is larger than our entire population of dial-up users."
Crozier continues "So many ISPs have grown from a base of hand-rolled systems that worked very well, but don`t scale readily and become very admin-intensive as the numbers of users climbs into the 5 and 6 figures. ISOCOR`s experience over the years with the highly demanding requirements of Telcos, and expertise in X.500 and LDAP directory servers, have enabled them to design very robust directory-aware servers that remain easy to manage even with such large user populations."
The N-Plex servers are available on NT and a variety of Unix platforms. According to Crozier, NT is often preferred - particularly in the corporate environment - because of its relative familiarity and ease of use in our skills-starved country, but there are those who prefer Unix for very high-volume, high-availability requirements. "The NT/Unix debate is not one we wish to take sides in, but rather be driven by market forces. We see a stronger reliance on NT in South Africa than is the case in Europe or the US, but there is still strong interest in Solaris and AIX, and we are watching with interest the development of Linux." While the levels of performance offered by the ISOCOR servers may seem overkill for the local market, Crozier believes it is not necessarily excessive: "User count is only one element of the equation. We see both more messages per user and larger message sizes as being the greater influencers on server performance requirements. One of our local customers is handling over 6GB of mail a day on a standard, single CPU PII/300 running NT, which is still running well within its limits. More message-handling ability per server means lower hardware costs, less susceptibility to hardware-related outages, and simpler management. But their mail volumes are growing at about 10% per month, so they see the need for scalability."
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