Low-cost Messaging and Content Storage for Service Providers

by Utpal Thakrar, Product Manager

When was the last time you cleaned out your email inbox?

The introduction of Gmail in 2004 changed consumer expectations about email by offering nearly unlimited mailbox capacity for free. It was a move that began to change our online behavior. From their April, '04 press release: ". . . . Gmail is built on the idea that users should never have to file or delete a message . . . . Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever." In large part, we do.

When Yahoo followed suit a few years later, IDC correctly forecasted that webmail/IMAP access to email would surpass POP3, in terms of number of users.

Not only has free storage become the norm, email message size is on the rise. High resolution photo/video cameras have helped push the average size of email attachments from a few kilobytes to megabytes. Today's email experience is much more storage intensive, placing the burden on the service provider to support all the content being shared and stored. What this means:

• Rising storage costs due to high storage demands
• Rising OPEX due to an increased hardware footprint
• More complicated data protection schemes
• Increased recovery time after failure
• Performance issues that current email systems are not equipped to handle

The bottom line: The cost of current storage solutions used by commercially available email products is simply too high for service providers to offer a competitive yet cost-effective email service to their consumers.

Openwave is taking on this problem with Email Mx: Stateless Edition. It is a horizontally scalable, highly reliable solution for email based on low-cost commodity storage hardware. We have seen our solution dramatically reduce service providers' TCO. They like Mx because it's simple and can be expanded to a general-purpose low-cost storage platform for other applications beyond email.

Our solution addresses the three most important issues service providers are facing: cost of ownership, horizontal scalability and reliability. And it means that people like me won't have to clean out their email box anytime soon.