Messaging Technology for ISPs

by Stephen M. Layne, Lotus Development Corporation

As the industry continues to evolve at a frenzied pace, Internet service providers (ISPs) are in the historic position of changing the way consumers and businesses worldwide conduct their activities. The ISP marketplace is projected at $15 billion at year-end, up dramatically from $1 billion just two years ago. Millions of people are looking to the Internet as their primary way to communicate, form virtual communities, and increasingly, to purchase goods and services. In short, a second wave of Internet services, focused on enhanced communications and electronic business, is quickly gaining momentum.

This new world of Internet services, with its demand for high-volume transactions, legacy data integration, security, and scalable and reliable platforms, plays to the strengths of industrial-strength messaging infrastructure providers. These customized solutions will allow ISPs to quickly and confidently design and deploy value-added offerings, with infrastructure that securely enables communication, collaboration, content and commerce.

Best-of-breed technologies are coming together to form the new platforms of choice for Internet Service Providers looking to differentiate their services in this competitive marketplace. For example, a scalable, highly available Internet standards-based messaging system under development codenamed Titanium will be an integral part of IBM messaging solutions for ISPs. The system is being designed to meet the high volume and performance demands of commercial Internet service providers, including telcos and VANs, and will support the full range of Internet messaging standards, including: SMTP, ESMTP, MIME, SNMP, LDAP, POP3 and IMAP4.

Our Titanium technology will help solve messaging system scalability problems by efficiently supporting hundreds of thousands of mailboxes per server, with transparent clustering of multiple mailbox and protocol servers for near-linear scalability. Titanium incorporates clustering support in the application, at the platform level (through HACMP), and includes network-level load balancing.

The system's multilevel clustering architecture makes it extremely resilient and highly available.

Titanium's design points are to produce an easy-to-manage system intended to set a new standard for price/performance while at the same time improve end-user satisfaction with exceptional levels of service availability.

The following design points for providing new platforms for ISPs were identified:

1. Scalable, highly-available design providing system reliability:

   • An efficient design which can scale an unlimited number of mailboxes per server (vertical scalability is configuration dependent);

   • The ability to transparently cluster mailbox and protocol servers using high-availability clustering management proto-col (HACMP). These clusters appear as single entities to end users and can be maintained and extended without disrupting service (horizontal scalability). This extremely reliable system improves end-user satisfaction with high system availability;

   • Optional X.500 user directory can be distributed across multiple servers, yet be transparently interconnected through standard directory access queries (DSP), without database replication;

   • Comprehensive, integrated solutions running on a common AIX platform.
     

2. Design for outsourcing of corporate and consumer messaging:

   • The solution can support multiple customer realms (with unlimited vanity names) per server, providing each customer with a unique user ID;

   • Feature-rich mailbox functionality which provides value-added messaging service in a commodity market with features such as: filters and exclusion lists to limit spam and unwanted mail, temporary message forwarding and household mailboxes with head-of-household management;

   • Distributed administration so each customer can manage their own user lists.
     

3. Design for Internet and other open standards:

   • Enable universal client access from any POP3, SMTP and IMAP4 mail client;

   • Universal connectivity with Internet standards-based systems worldwide;

   • Support for X.500 protocols, access controls and knowledge management;

   • Support for LDAP, the emerging Internet standard for directory access;

   • No need for proprietary gateways as native Internet connectivity is employed.
     

4. Reduce the total cost of system operations, deployment and management:

   • Delegated administration empowers end-users through an easy-to-understand Web-based graphical user interface, reducing ISP support costs;

   • The solution offers a number of interfaces, including, Batch, C-library APIs and Perl scripts which can be used to interface the solution with existing system infrastructures such as security and user administration;

   • Flexible, efficient design enables system to be deployed on relatively lower levels of hardware platforms in competitive price/performance comparisons;

   • The solution's modular design enables selective component upgrades to better match individual customer requirements.
     

5. Design Internet standards management protocols to plug into existing network infrastructures:

   • Integrated SNMP/MADMAN-based messaging instrumentation complements existing network management infrastructure;

   • Use existing SNMP instrumentation, therefore reducing the number of consoles to be monitored;

   • Generate exception notifications and forward them to network consoles, helping to isolate errors;

   • Support browser-based management interfaces for system configuration and management.

Today's Internet service provider exists in a high-volume, low-margin business environment. Because of the extremely competitive nature of the ISP business, some analysts predict there will be 50% fewer ISPs by the year 2000, even though Internet messaging grows at a frenzied pace.

Only ISPs which can offer unique messaging services on controllable margins will succeed. A messaging system which is not reliable will quickly convert profits into customer service costs. The key to success is to control customer support requirements with an infrastructure which is highly available, extremely reliable and backed by a worldwide service organization.