I thought it would be useful to update customers on the changes we’ve made to our infrastructure, following on from the announcements made back in December 2007, and close the loop.

Summary
At a high level, the following improvements have been made this new year:

• We are rejecting nearly 5 million more spam emails per day than we were previously, since adopting the Spamhaus Zen block list
• We have a live VMware based cluster, running a new POP3, IMAP and Outbound SMTP relay email cluster (see below)
• We have added 7TB of storage to our backup servers, to keep better copies and backups.
• We have implemented our Redhat GFS based clustered file system, and moved the majority of customer emails onto it, although we are still working to address some performance concerns we have with it.

Finally, we have nearly completed building our “newsip” platform on the VMware platform, which will form the basis of our next VoIP products, and we are also completing the implementation of a Zimbra service, which will provide push email on mobile devices and a richer webmail client.

Email Cluster Testing
We’ve have been re-working our pop3, imap, relay.g and other servers and the new service is now available for testing on the host read-mail.gradwell.net.

(This host will ultimately become pop3.gradwell.net / relay.gradwell.net)

read-mail.gradwell.net / 79.135.125.10 is a load balancer, which is providing the following services:

• pop3 (110) and pop3 over SSL (995)
• imap (143) and imap over SSL (993)
• odmr (port 366)
• smtp-auth relaying (ports 25, 225 and 587) and smtp-ssl (465)

Operating this cluster are

• 3 pop3 servers
• 5 imap servers
• 2 odmr servers
• 3 smtp relay servers

Additionally, these are virtual servers, so creating more capacity is just a case of using our automated server cloning tools, and adding more CPU power to our VMWare cluster.

Finally, you may wish to note that 79.135.125.0/25 255.255.255.128 is a new subnet/vlan for our email infrastructure. All this will be announced properly in due course - at the moment, it is only used for reading mail and sending mail, so should not affect customer firewalling.

Please let us know how you get on with the new server cluster - we appreciate feedback via the usual channels.