HP SAN-Blasts Email

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and email server vendor Mirapoint Inc. are claiming they've captured the record for high-scale email delivery, with the ability to process the equivalent of 17 million email messages per day (see HP, Mirapoint Claim Email Record).

The companies tested their configuration with the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC)'s SPECmail test, which showed a message capacity and performance of 1.25 million SPECmail users -- almost 25 percent higher than the previous record, held by Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW).

"Customers are frantic because they need a way to keep up with the email volume that they have, and they need the ability to recall those email messages," says Rusty Smith, director of HP's StorageWorks Life Cycle Data Management group.

The test bed comprised HP's StorageWorks XP128 disk array with 16 Gbytes of storage cache, connected to a 16-port, 1-Gbit/s Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) SilkWorm 2800 switch, along with five of Mirapoint's message servers running dual Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) 1.4-GHz Pentium III processors.

That's all well and good -- but 17 million messages per day? It would seem that only service providers and very large enterprises need a system that can handle that volume. But Smith says it's more of a proof of concept that the system can scale: "Is any individual enterprise customer going to send 17 million email messages a day? Probably not. But it's a validation of the solution."Moreover, new regulations in the financial industry, for example, are placing demands on companies to have an email system that does have the ability to scale into the millions of messages, says Nadia Mansour, VP of worldwide channels and alliances at Mirapoint. "Many customers don't have a way to do that reliably today," she says.

Smith adds that the HP/Mirapoint SPECmail test is part of a larger effort HP has launched to help customers archive and protect data. Earlier this week, HP also announced that it would resell Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) EmailXtender message archiving software (see HP to Resell Legato Email Archiver).

The test was the first time the SPECmail benchmark was conducted using SAN storage, the companies claim. The storage array used on the test, HP's XP128, is actually a rebranded version of the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Lightning 9970V.

Full results of the HP/Mirapoint benchmark test can be found at http://www.spec.org/mail2001/results/res2003q2/.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch