What Is SmarterMail HA

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. Below is a break down of the 3 basic concepts of SmarterMail HA: architecture, licensing, and how it's priced.

Architecture 

SmarterMail HA utilizes centralized storage for data files, 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. A primary benefit of HA is the ability to have cold standbys for hubs and nodes that are automatically enabled should a hub or node fail. In addition, HA allows you to split users of a single domain across multiple nodes. For example, a single domain with 10,000 mailboxes can be split across 4 separate nodes, each node having 2500 users. Then, a standby node can be there to take over should one of the production nodes fail.

Licensing

With SmarterMail HA, each piece is licensed: hubs and nodes all require their own licenses. In addition, each license is, essentially, a SmarterMail Enterprise license and node licenses include, as part of the monthly cost, the MAPI and EWS add-on.

How It's Priced

SmarterMail HA is priced on a monthly "lease" model for each hub and node you have. This is because cluster architectures, by and large, require more flexibility due to the need to add or remove hubs and nodes based on usage and growth. Add-ons are also priced on a monthly lease model, though the MAPI and EWS add-on is included with any node license. SmarterMail HA does have its own license agreement and partnership requirement as well.

Things To Consider

When looking at SmarterMail HA, either as a new install or migrating an existing installation over to it, there are a few things to consider, think about, and ask yourself.

• What is your overall goal? When most people think about server clusters, they look at supporting a larger installation of a specific application that requires a high level of fault tolerance and reliability. SmarterMail can certainly benefit when set up as a cluster, but do your business requirements dictate the need for a cluster?
• When setting up your HA cluster, how will you distribute domains and mailboxes?
• Do you have a single domain that you want to split across multiple nodes? For example, a larger customer with thousands of mailboxes could have accounts split across 3 or more nodes. Or, you’re looking to set up an email hosting service like Gmail or Hotmail where all accounts use the same email domain.
• Do you have an idea of which users will go on what node?
• Do some users need sharing and collaboration features? If so, they should be on the same node.
• Do you want some nodes to have different hardware configurations, such as more RAM and/or more CPU?
• This would allow you to put “super users”, or users who have subscribed to a higher email plan, on one node and less demanding users on another.
• How many hubs and nodes to you want, versus how many you need? In many cases more is better, but not in every case.
• How will you architect your installation? Standard share -> hub -> node set up? Load balancer at the front end? What about incoming or outgoing gateways? Remote antispam servers/services?
• What is your overall plan for expansion? When will you need another hub or node? What about expanding your shares?

As you can imagine, a lot goes into deciding not just how to set up a SmarterMail HA cluster, but why? There are a number of things to consider, think about, plan, and execute.

We're Here to Help

There’s a lot that goes into deciding whether SmarterMail HA is a good choice for you. As always, we’re here to help. Before making the leap to SmarterMail HA, we recommend connecting with us: we’ll schedule a call to go over all of the above, ask questions, answer questions you have, and really help guide you in he decision making process.

Getting Started

If you're interested in getting started with SmarterMail HA, please contact us at sales@smartertools.com and we can get you into a SmarterMail HA monthly partnership.  We can also help walk you through the process, help you plan your infrastructure, and guide you through the entire cluster process. We are email experts and nothing excites us more than discussing your needs and how we can help make your plans work.