Broadside

AT A GLANCE

It all started with “Can you build a system which send a million emails a day, reliably?” Large companies with millions of customers or partners often need to send out millions of emails a day, with order confirmations, e-tickets, and what not.

Challenges

All companies send emails from their corporate email system. Very few of these email systems can handle a surge of 200,000 emails generated from their business servers in an hour. Mass email transmission is a different animal altogether. And you can’t have your customer walking away because he is not receiving his airplane e-ticket on time.

The second challenge is that any system sending out millions of emails every day begins to look like …. yes, you guessed it: a spammer! We cannot have all the spam blockers in the world ganging up and pointing fingers at us, can we? Honest, tax-paying email transmission systems would go belly-up in no time.

The third issue here is simply one of size. How do you process, filter, log, and send out emails in such quantity that one or two servers fall woefully short? How do you orchestrate a dozen or fifty servers to work together to spread the good word without a hiccup? Excellent scalability and cluster management tools and processes are required.

Solutions

What we built here looks nothing like all the corporate email systems our lead engineers have been designing and implementing since the mid-nineties.

The Broadside system uses huge amounts of parallel processing to handle huge data surges of email, and multiple distributed databases to keep track of everything. One executive can control the entire flow of one campaign or one batch from one console, irrespective of how many servers are at play.

The system runs on a cluster of Linux servers, and can scale up to 50+ servers without any problems. Each server is so finely optimised that our largest corporate customers have not been able to load more than two servers even during their peak hours.

Broadside is the only system we have ever designed where, given the right load, a server is stressed simultaneously on all four of its resources: CPU speed, RAM capacity, disk I/O speed, and network bandwidth. This ain’t no financial accounting package.

Broadside: a term from all-out gun battles during the golden era of sailing ships, when a ship would fire all its cannons from one side of its hull in a terrifying barrage of mayhem. We like the name!

NOW THAT’S VALUE

Our customers are some of the largest retail stockbroking firms, retail banks, and the largest securities depository of India. For them, sending out a small batch of 200,000 or 1,500,000 emails and knowing that delivery is tracked and reported for each message, is a big load off their chests.Our systems run 24×7 so that they can reach their customers on time, maintain their customers’ trust. Brokers in India need to deliver trade confirmation notices to investors within a few hours of closing bell at the stock exchange, or else they incur the wrath of the regulatory powers.These brokers trust our systems to deliver on time. Broadside has risen to every reliability and scalability challenge thrown at it.

The case study above is published purely as a factual example of work done by Remiges Technologies (“Remiges”) for a client, and may contain some views of Remiges. Remiges asserts that the work described above is factually correct. Remiges has no association or relationship with the client other than as vendor and client for the duration of the contract. Nothing here indicates or implies any endorsement, promotion, or support for Remiges by the client or of the work done, nor does it represent the views of the client. Remiges does not represent the client in any capacity.