“Hotmail usa FreeBSD en sus servidores web los cuales se conectan a un cluster de maquinas SUN para almacenar todo el correo en una base de datos Oracle”

Así es como empezó Hotmail…

Desde que Microsoft compro a Hotmail, ha intentando migrar todo a NT pero a la fecha no ha tenido resultados satisfactorios.

“The software giant has attempted to exchange the Sun/Solaris infrastructure of Hotmail with NT since buying it in December 1997. However, the demands of supporting 10 million users reportedly proved too great for NT, and Solaris was reinstated. In a leaked report, sources close to Hotmail said: "... its whole mail server infrastructure is Solaris. NT couldn't handle it. On the web server, they're running MP Pentiums and Apache on FreeBSD. They're moving to Solaris for threads. The engineering team did its best to run NT - and failed. The issue's being escalated." Hotmail is running Apache's /1.2.1 web server which is not available for NT due to technical difficulties. A statement on Apache's website states: "The road to Windows NT has not been a pretty one. Several attempts have been made, both by Apache Group members and outside folks, but due to a lack of stability and a clear consensus on how to manage a true cross-platform development project, NT is not yet a standard platform supported by Apache."

El cluster de Hotmail funciona usando varios registros MX como se muestra a continuación:

hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mail.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mc2.law5.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mc4.law5.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mc5.law5.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mc6.law5.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. IN MX 10 mc7.law5.hotmail.com.

A los que han usado Round-Robin esto tal vez se les haga familiar solo qué aquí es para el sistema de correo MX.

Todos los mensajes enviados y revividos son almacenados en una base de datos, lo cual simplifica en mucho la tarea de un cluster, en especial haciendo las replicas de los buzones en todos los servidores.

Hay versiones que usan software libre para ofrecer un servicio como lo hace Hotmail, un ejemplo es @Mail, este producto utiliza a mysql como base de datos aprovechando su función de replicación la cual ayuda cuando se requiere hacer un cluster.