Send Fast, Send More – High Volume Bulk Email Server Clusters

LuxSci’s Secure High Volume bulk emailing service provides excellent deliverability for HIPAA-compliant mass mailings, including newsletters, appointment reminders, and other types of transactional emails. Using email server clusters is an effective way to send high volumes of email in a scalable manner.

It is often the case that customers require either:

• Sending to large numbers of recipients (millions to tens of millions or more in a month)
• Sending many messages quickly (in short bursts)

In either case, the mail server needs to handle large numbers of concurrent connections and process large mail queues quickly.

Single Server vs. High Availability Server Configurations

1. “Big Gun” – Use a single mail server that is powerful enough to handle everything by itself.
2. “More Guns” – Use a cluster of modest mail servers that can handle everything via a group effort.

The “Big Gun” method is the simplest and works initially. Adding more RAM and more processor cores to a machine does boost throughput. However, as you continue pushing the server, continued gains require more expensive hardware — extremely fast RAIDed disks, multiple multi-core processors, large amounts of memory, operating system fine-tuning, optimized networking, etc. This causes the cost of such a machine to outpace the gains in throughput quickly.

The “More Guns” method involves load balancing multiple inexpensive mail servers to form a “server cluster.” While more complex, this has significant advantages in that:

• Adding more inexpensive servers enhances throughput and capacity.
• The cost of additional capacity scales roughly as the capacity itself (it doesn’t get increasingly costly to add the next chunk of capacity).
• Having some extra capacity via another server in the cluster creates a “failover” situation, where email sending continues as usual even if one of the mail servers fails or is taken down for maintenance. This provides disaster recovery benefits if relying on email as a business-critical communication channel.

High Availability Email Server Clusters at LuxSci

LuxSci recognizes the value and scalability inherent in the “more guns” server cluster approach. For customers who need to:

• Send millions (or more) of emails per month,
• Send large numbers of messages in a short time,
• Have redundancy requirements for disaster recovery,

LuxSci provides dedicated High Volume Email server configurations that can be customized to meet any high availability sending requirement. These server clusters can scale to meet any desired sending volume or throughput. We prefer the flexibility and reliability that the multiple server approach offers. If one giant server fails, all email sending stops. Using multiple servers provides more uptime and redundancy in case of emergencies or issues. In addition, the multiple server approach is often more cost-effective.

Please get in touch with sales, and we can develop a custom solution to meet your exact sending needs.