Larry Seltzer wrote an interesting article in eWeek a few weeks back. He is examining the fact that enterprise messaging demands increasingly more resources, not only due to the rapid growth of message volumes, but also because more and more sub-processes must be executed before actual message delivery.

“Think, for example, of all the things that must happen to a message either inbound or outbound. There is the basic transport protocol, the SMTP commands. The message itself may be encrypted, so there is encryption and decryption. The message may be signed. The message needs to be scanned for malware, for phishing, for malicious HTML. The sender of the message may be authenticated through DKIM or Sender ID, and their reputation evaluated. Regulatory compliance rules must be enforced. Company policies about the message must be enforced. Think also that multiple messages might be processed at once—sort of like superscalar processing for messages.”

While many companies leverage virtualization to increase the utilization of expensive hardware, messaging may actually be one application that can natively exploit raw processing power through massive process parallelization.

“Messaging is so core and critical to businesses these days that it has to be done right and it has to be done with reasonable performance. So bring on the CPU cores, throw memory and disk arrays at them and don’t skimp. While you’re at it, add some extra redundancy for reliability purposes. Your mail volume and the number of problems in that mail are only going to increase.”

Technorati Tags: enterprise messaging, email policy enforcement, email performance

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