The challenges of managing Hotmail: The Mount Everest of E-mail Services

[Kristijntje]

In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all.

To understand how they do it, and to learn more about what it takes to manage such an enormous service, we invited Hotmail engineer Phil Smoot to speak with us. Smoot has been with Microsoft for 11 years and is a product unit manager in Microsoft’s MSN division. He manages the product development teams in Silicon Valley that are responsible for the Hotmail-MSN Communication platform, which includes storage, e-mail delivery, spam prevention, protocol services, directory services, and data warehousing...

full article: http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=353&page=1