Comments on: One big regret

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:23:40 +0000

During “Big Squeeze” a couple of us actually had proposed different mail architectures (it was really too late at that point). I seem to remember Martijn mentioning setups at other large mail houses where they built around low-cost machines using open source.

There was a lot of pushback by ops, though. They didn’t want to manage a lot of little machines. They were happier running fewer huge machines.

By: Pat

Pat — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:57:37 +0000

How much of that money spent on Oracle licenses could have been spent replacing software.com with an existing (or even from scratch infrastructure?). Something like

(N Sun 4500s) * (31 Procs/4500) * ($$$$$/proc oracle licensing) => really big number!!!

Isn’t it fun to talk about all that hardware in casual conversation?

In the scramble to create new features (spell check, virus scanning, whatever) the mail team didn’t do a good enough job of making the business case for a different architecture. It’s hard to stop on the path you’re on and move to another. It’s one thing to complain about how silly something is (engineers do this so often I think that it becomes noise). It’s still another to turn those complaints into a reasonable argument for change.

Another good Joe K. Bit where he talks about Excite:
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/03/the_long_tail_o.html

A blog by bnoopy:
bnoop bloggy blog?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 01:24:29 +0000

I did mention Oracle briefly, but yes…we paid a lot of money for a component of the architecture that was among the least stable.

As for why we were buying Suns, if I remember correctly it was because OpenWave pretty much required it. I believe the only other platforms InterMail would run on weren’t very attractive. We couldn’t even run the frontends on lower cost hardware because InterMail didn’t provide libraries for other platforms (i.e. Linux or FreeBSD) and their IMAP servers didn’t perform adequately enough to put our frontends on Linux and use the JavaMail IMAP provider.

Of course, we could have funded a team to build a new mail backend that didn’t have such silly requirements (Solaris and Oracle). But I seem to remember on at least one occasion a product manager was heard saying, “but they’re Java programmers.” Thanks for the faith in our skills, BD.

By: koblas

koblas — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 19:16:04 +0000

You neglected to mention that we spent quite a bit of time saying “this is dumb” why are we buying Suns. Also, you neglect that we also were pouring money into Oracle’s hands to do the database half of the puzzle that would require about a 4 hour outage to rebuild the indexes at least once a quarter.