Managing Email Uptime…
There is a lot of talk today in the industry about guaranteed uptime in regards to email. A lot of companies offer 99.9% uptime, etc., but fall short of explaining how this is guaranteed. I think that in a lot of cases by offering this 99.9% uptime guarantee they (other service providers) are more or less mimicking their competition. I have spent a little bit of time researching this and thought that it would be worthwhile to explain and educate our clients and potential future clients as to how we go about managing uptime for our email service.
In today’s business climate, businesses rely heavily on email for things like customer transactions, vendor relationships, and internal communications. The Pleth Networks Plethware Premium Email Solution features an industry-leading 99.99% uptime guarantee. This guarantee is a reflection of both our understanding of email’s central importance to many businesses and a reflection of the high availability email system engineered by our experts.
Pleth Networks has selected an approach to high availability popularized by Google, which is a large numbers of computer servers built on commodity hardware. The basic theory is that server failures are common, and will happen from time to time. We arrange servers in pairs or clusters, then build failure detection into the network and software.
In the past, we have tried the more traditional, high availability design approach: high-end servers with high-end disk subsystems. The mean time between failure (MTBF) was only somewhat better than commodity hardware, although the high-end server hardware was many times more expensive. For the same cost, key services are now spread across large numbers of servers in single-purpose clusters. Our experience has shown this greatly reduces the risk that any service might become unavailable to our customers in turn giving our clients a higher likelihood of uptime in their email services and less likelihood of downtime. This approach has proven to be most effective, to learn more about Plethware Premium Email Solutions, click here.
