Dedicated Server Reviews

I'll keep this one briefer than some of my other posts about the meetings I had at HostingCon, mostly because we covered part of the conversation - regarding the basic facts of the launch of AtMail's "clustered edition" - in a news story we posted from the show. But also because of the rather lengthy phone conversation I had with Corey Bissaillon a while back, which ought to produce a feature for the site within the next week.

So look for that - there is more to come about AtMail.

I met up with Bissaillon at the show to discuss the company's platform - an email server and groupware server platform that AtMail delivers most commonly in the form of an appliance running the software.

As in most of these "discussing a product" type blog entries, listing the AtMail features would be mostly redundant, given the fairly exhaustive approach taken on the company's own website. So I figured instead I'd talk about some of the technology the company seems most excited about.

Bissaillon was keen on the MySQL server engineering that has gone into the clustered edition. He says that while standard MySQL clustering practices use a "master-slave" relationship between clustered machines that makes the architecture scalable, they are only somewhat more reliable because in the case of an outage on the master server, a slave must manually be made the master. The AtMail clustered edition enables a "master-master" sort of clustering relationship (or master-master-master, or master-master-master-master, etc.) that makes the system both highly scalable and much more reliable.

Another interesting facet of the company's more recent efforts is the release of a free and open version of its webmail interface.

Being as the free webmail interface is the general premise of the upcoming feature, I won't go into such great detail here. But the basic idea is that the company has released an open version of its much-admired webmail interface, trusting in the product's ability to create back-end systems customers down the road out of users who simply want to deploy a free webmail interface today. That is, Bissaillon says he's confident customers using the webmail interface will appreciate the way AtMail operates enough to come talk to the company when they're looking to build out their back-end systems.

On top of that, it's a good way for the company to give a project back to the open source community, many of the best efforts of which (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL) are incorporated into the operation of its own products.

Allow me to cut and paste my preamble from Tuesday's MailChannels post:

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I'll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Wednesday (at HostingCon) was a busy day. I talked to a lot of people on Wednesday, which is why I'm playing catch-up this week. Everyone had some very interesting stuff to say, and nobody warranted leaving out, which is why I'm still playing catch-up more than a week later.

The good news: if you can bear with me for another couple of posts, I'll be wrapping up my own HostingCon coverage either today or tomorrow, and moving on to blogging about other things.

The other good news: all these HostingCon follow-up posts are about interesting conversations I had with interesting people doing interesting work. Hopefully you'll find them, you know, interesting.

One of those people I spoke to Wednesday was John Davies of MailSite, who was promoting both his company's MailSite Fusion messaging and collaboration platform, and its AstraSync plug-in software for Blackberry phones.

MailSite Fusion is an email and collaboration platform for Windows, intended to be a more affordable alternative to hosted Exchange. The list of features is long, and rather than repeat them all here, I'll direct you to the MailSite website for the exhaustive pitch.

The especially interesting part of the discussion was a model Davies described for deploying and offering a MailSite-based hosted email offering.

There are plenty of small businesses these days that are convinced of the value of hosted email, particularly hosted Exchange. And while they may be ready to come on board looking for the brand name at first, many of those small businesses can't afford a hosted Exchange solution.

MailSite, on the other hand, is designed to be private labeled. So a hosting provider can set up a lower-cost house-brand hosted messaging and collaboration solution they can offer to customers who decide the Exchange solution is to expensive an alternative for about 50 percent of the cost. He says the host's margin is about the same as Exchange when charging the customer half as much.

The example he gives for this particular two-pronged approach is the ever-used-as-an-example Rackspace, which offers a hosted Exchange solution alongside a house-brand mail service (in Rackspace's case, the house brand is Mailtrust, which is the re-branded Webmail.us, acquired last year by Rackspace).

It's a cool idea. Offer the hosted Exchange service for the customers who are committed to the brand, and supplement that with the house-brand alternative for the customers who don't want to spend the extra money.

AstraSync is something else altogether. It's a plugin application for Blackberry phones that enables them to accept the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, creating a direct connection that eliminates the need for the email host to operate a Blackberry Enterprise Server.

The application is a separate product form MailSite fusion, but is a cool little app nonetheless. It hasn't launched just yet, but should be available in the next few weeks for about $50 per mailbox per year. You can sign up to receive more information about it at the AstraSync website.

The WHIR's editor Liam, as well as some of our other contributing bloggers, have been doing a great job at bringing you a slew of interesting thoughts and discussions from this past HostingCon 2008. I can't even begin to link to all the posts they've done but definitely scroll through here and take a look at what's been said.

Over the three-day event I had the opportunity to chat to a lot of new and old faces and will be sharing these interviews with you in the coming weeks. To give you a small idea of some of the things you can look forward to we'll be bringing you our first conversation with Oliver Mauss, the new CEO of 1&1, and his new vision for the company, discussions with Paul Hirsch about formulating the first association dedicated to the hosting industry, an interview with Sedo regarding the secondary domain market, and a rather unique and unprecedented interview with Microsoft about its recent Hyper-V technology release and goals with cloud computing (you'll know what I mean by unique when you see it...think Xbox).

To begin, here's some feedback from the exhibitors and attendees from HostingCon 2008.

Many applications that are used on a standard server perform quite a few of small writes to the disk (like MySQL or Apache). These writes can pile up and limit the performance of your applications. If you have kernel 2.6.9 or later, you can adjust how these small writes are handled to allow for better performance.

There’s two main kernel variables to know:

vm.dirty_ratio - The highest % of your memory that can be used to hold dirty data. If you set this to a low value, the kernel will flush small writes to the disk more often. Higher values allow the small writes to stack up in memory. They’ll go to the disk in bigger chunks.

vm.dirty_background_ratio - The lowest % of your memory where pdflush is told to stop when it is writing dirty data. You’ll want to keep this set as low as possible.

These might confuse you. In short, when your memory begins filling with little pieces of data that needs to be written to the disk, it will keep filling until it reaches the dirty_ratio. At that point, pdflush will start up, and it will write data until it reduces the dirty data to the value set by dirty_background_ratio.

Stock 2.6.9 kernels have a dirty_background_ratio of 10% and a dirty_ratio of 40%. Some distributions tweak these defaults to something different, so you may want to review the settings on your system. On a system with heavy disk I/O, you can increase the dirty_ratio and reduce the dirty_background_ratio. A little experimentation may be necessary to find the perfect setting for your server.

If you want to play with the variables, just use your standard echo:

echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
echo 60 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

Once you’ve found the right setting, you can set it permanently by adding lines to your /etc/sysctl.conf:

vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_ratio = 60

If you have a reliable server with a good RAID card and power supply, you could set the dirty_ratio to 100 and the dirty_background_ratio to 1. This was recommended by a buddy of mine who runs quite a few servers running virtual machines.