A Brief History of Corvid

About three years ago, we noticed that our existing email infrastructure was aging badly, and not suitable for responding to some of the newest challenges and attacks. We started exploring options for its replacement. Among other things, we formed an ad hoc committee under the Facilities Advisory Committee, in May 2003, to help us with the planning.

Since then, we in SCS Computing Facilities have made a significant investment in modernizing our e-mail infrastructure. The new infrastructure, Corvid, based on Cyrus, has been designed for very high reliability and availability, very good performance (timely delivery) and rich in functionality. We have incorporated best-of-breed anti-spam service (Sophos PureMessage), and anti-virus service (also from Sophos) at the server level. We have installed all new hardware for the servers to provide higher performance and greater reliability; we have implemented multiple "front-ends" for redundancy, gaining the ability to survive single failures; the back-end message stores (for your data) are implemented in RAID-5 storage arrays so that single disk failures can be survived without service interruptions. The storage capacity has been increased more than 10-fold to provide a long-lasting repository for your important messages; this is readily expandable for the future, by the way. The entire system has been designed to be easier to manage and administer, helping us minimize maintenance windows, and respond to new attacks more quickly.

We will continue to invest in the new infrastructure to increase the richness of its functionality, and the value that it delivers. Today, Corvid has 1,000 users (including all new users since summer of 2004, and many converted users); Corvid has proven itself as a strong performer: more reliable, higher performing, and better able to withstand outside attacks than the old system. There remain about 1,500 users receiving mail elsewhere in SCS - mostly on ux-machines. The migration of those 1,500 is underway. If you haven't already been contacted by us (help@cs), you will be at some time in the coming weeks or months; we are working our way through an orderly transition.