Lean infrastructure

Lean infrastructure means high performance on lower cost hardware, using standard components and standard interfaces, and enabling management with standard tools. It is common to see significant infrastructure cost savings depending on configuration.

The PostPath lean infrastructure approach allows:

Lower cost servers, storage, tools, etc.
Overall infrastructure provides a smaller administration footprint
Server consolidation further reduces server maintenance
The infrastructure becomes flexible, modular and easy to change or extend
Overall, the system is more robust and reliable

How Does PostPath Enable Lean Infrastructure?

The ability to create a lean infrastructure comes from an efficient server architecture combined with the use of standard interfaces and modules to avoid proprietary closed-box components within the system.

In particular, the PostPath Server™ is designed to leverage Linux and Linux-mountable filing systems for storage, rather than to rely on the closed Jet database seen in Exchange™. File-system-based storage enables the use of file-system level capabilities for backup , replication (see here) for redundancy, disaster recovery and business continuity support. If desired, it also makes practical (since the server storage can be substantially lower cost, and since backup and restore are so much more efficient) providing much larger server-side user mailbox stores.

The PostFix Mail Transport Agent (one of the most commonly used MTAs used by volume providers of email services) acts as the MTA in the PostPath system. PostPath has enabled the MTA to handle both standards-based MTA traffic and also the Microsoft forms of MTA traffic; the PostPath Server™ translates backwards and forwards between the two forms. In this way, standards-based filters (including virus filters) and archiving systems are able to be used in the heart of the enterprise email infrastructure. In contrast, in an all-Microsoft infrastructure proprietary server APIs have to be used for both virus filtering and archiving, driving cost and reducing system performance.

Just as PostPath has integrated standard components and enabled system access via a standard interface for the MTA (mail transport agent), a similar approach is also taken in a number of other areas including: AJAX Webclient, use of the filing system standard filing system tools for storage, backup and restore, replication and redundancy, and system management.

In more general terms, PostPath's underlying approach to system architecture is simplicity, with proven building blocks being used wherever possible. Simplicity plus proven components is the route to both higher performance and robustness.