How to Get There From Here: Scaling the Enterprise-Wide Mail Infrastructure

Recent explosions in volume of mail traffic and in numbers of people making use of Internet email has had a rapidly negative effect on many sites built with assumptions about low mail volume. Older solutions such as NFS are found not to scale upwards to the new email demands of the enterprise-wide email infrastructure. This paper examines this widely-experienced scenario as it unfolded at Duke University, discusses the problems experienced along the way, and describes in detail a solution for migration to a larger-scale infrastructural model that is incremental, transparent to users, and cost-effective.