A Groovy Box

Mirapoint shipped an M2000 to our partner lab at Schneider National in Green Bay, Wis. The box it ships in is so big I couldn't move it off the loading dock by myself. The box is also very cool -- it even has its own door. I opened it up and the product rolled out. Ten minutes later, I had mail services -- IMAP/POP, SMTP, Web and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)-based mail -- up and running. The system comprises two M2000 appliances, two UPS units and up to 580-GB storage via high-performance external Fibre Channel RAID. This turnkey solution is an excellent choice for anyone requiring easy-to-manage, fault-tolerant messaging services.

The system can be configured through a robust administrative client or a CLI (command-line interface) via telnet or SSH (Secure Shell) 1. The M2000's many server features include distribution-list support, LDAP, NIS (network information services) and virus-scanning by Trend Micro. An integrated Legato Systems backup client provides backup capability to remote devices, as well as support for NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) via Veritas NetBackup. Connectivity is 100 Mbps on Fast Ethernet. Mirapoint says it will add Gigabit Ethernet support this year.

One of the only things you might not like about the M2000 is the price. A single unit will run $22,000, plus the cost of storage at $17,000. To support 10,000 mailboxes, you'll need to shell out $16,000 -- just to create them. That price doesn't include the basic mail services. Each service -- IMAP/POP, SMTP, Web and WAP -- will cost you. For 10,000 POP users, you'll pay $8,000, and the same number of IMAP users costs $25,000. Ten thousand users on Mirapoint's Webmail Direct will require an additional $12,500, and 10,000 WAPmail Direct users will set you back another $15,000. A clustered system will add $28,000 to your bill for the licensing and the cost of a second M2000. If you're not looking for redundancy, a typical system supporting 10,000 users with IMAP/ POP3 and SMTP services costs around $88,000. Make that a redundant system by adding an additional M2000 and clustering software, and you can write your check for $138,000. Most mail servers cost a lot less than the M2000, but none offers the same security, reliability or fault tolerance.

Setting Up

I configured the initial system parameters -- IP address and host name -- via the keypad on the front of the M2000. This can also be accomplished via a serial connection, but the keypad is a great way to get things up and running quickly.

The first unit acted as the active mail server while the second was in standby mode, monitoring the heartbeat of the primary unit and waiting to take over in case of any type of failure. The heartbeat is actually written to a specific sector on the hard drive. If the standby cannot read it for a specified period of time, the standby takes over.

I accessed the M2000 via a Web browser and downloaded the Java-based administrative client to a Microsoft Windows NT workstation -- 95/98/ME and 2000 are also supported -- to set up the rest of the features. Everything can be done from the GUI -- from managing the RAID storage system to adding users to performance monitoring.

Working Out the Bugs

I created a few users and started the mail services and SNMP. I set one user's mailbox quota to 5 KB and proceeded to send massive amounts of mail from the other user to see if notification would be received by the sender when the mailbox was full. While the recipient received a warning indicating that the quota had been reached, the sender did not.

I removed the quota and waited to see if the recipient would receive the messages. After a little more than 10 minutes, delivery did not occur. Aha! This was something we'd looked at the last time we tested Mirapoint's offering. After speaking with Mirapoint, I discovered that the system will retry sending the message every 30 minutes. I had not waited long enough. Additionally, the implementation provides for an administrative configuration for the amount of time passed before the sender receives a "Message undeliverable" message; the default is four hours.

I moved on to the Webmail Direct feature, which provides Web-based e-mail access. The only complaint I have about the interface is that two steps are required to delete messages -- first they are marked "deleted" and then they are "compacted," effectively removing them from the system. I'd like to see this done in a single step. From a performance standpoint, Mirapoint's Web-based e-mail interacts directly with the message store, meaning no translation from POP/IMAP to HTTP and vice versa. This will be especially appreciated by users with low-bandwidth connections.

A few other issues raised during our last test have been addressed. In addition to the keypad configuration option, real-time blacklists are now supported.

The Appliance Paradigm

Because the M2000 is an appliance, it can offer availability, security and scalability not found in software-only messaging servers. There is no shell access, making it more difficult for hackers to gain access to the system. Messaging security is available via SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security).

I tested the failover accidentally, and it worked like a charm. During initial configuration, the network link for the primary unit apparently failed. The standby unit immediately took over as expected. Even though I had been adding users and setting up mailboxes, I did not notice that the primary unit had failed. I saw that the LCD display on the primary unit claimed it was the standby and decided to investigate by pawing through the logs. I found the notification that the primary link had failed so the standby unit was taking over. Now that's seamless failover.

Upgrading the appliance is a breeze. A simple CLI tells the unit to fetch the update from Mirapoint's FTP server and install it. While the process may take some time -- the upgrade from 2.71, which we tested, to 2.8 is a 58-MB file -- it can be done in a single process.

The M2000 has everything you could want in a high-availability, fault-tolerant messaging system. After considering the potential cost of downtime as well as the cost of maintaining and managing multiple messaging systems, you may find the price isn't as bad as it seems. In a comparable system created from scratch, the cost of hardware alone could easily run as high as that of the Mirapoint solution. And for the pain of trying to piece it together, the M2000 is a much better option for the money.