What Is a SmarterMail Hub

SmarterMail High Availability, or SmarterMail HA for short, allows businesses to build a fault-tolerant SmarterMail cluster on the exact same code base as previous versions of SmarterMail. It utilizes centralized storage, such as a mounted volume on a centralized storage system, and consists of a series of hubs and nodes working together as a fault tolerant cluster.

Hubs proxy content and authentication to nodes, and nodes house domains and mailboxes and act, essentially, as standalone SmarterMail Enterprise installations. Hubs, then, sit in front of nodes. They direct traffic to its final destination: a message comes in for bjones@example,com, the hub knows which node bjones@example.com is assigned to, and then sends the message there.

Node also contain a number of settings for the cluster as a whole, and remove some of the management of these settings from nodes. For example, most of the protocol work is handed by a hub. SSL certificates are also managed by the hub. Cluster security is also handled by the hub. This includes IDS Rules and IDS Blocks, Blacklisting / Whitelisting, and SMTP Blocks.