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Abstract

Email is one of the most well established and widely used services available on the Internet. With the popularity of Linux in the server market, especially amongst Internet Service Providers it should be no surprise that Linux is the platform of choice for many mail servers. The current growth of the Internet places increasing demands on both the hardware and software to deliver more mail to more users more quickly than ever before.

There comes a point where a single server can no longer cope. This is particularly a problem as the PC hardware market, which provides affordable hardware for applications such as this, is driven by increasing processor speeds and not the increases in I/O that are required to shuffle increasing volumes of mail.

One solution to this problem is to implement multiple email servers or a server farm to deal with the load. Messages are typically independent of each other and hence, parallelisation is a natural step to take. Implementing this is a manner that is transparent to users is non-trivial, but can can yield significant benefits, providing both increased capacity and high availability.