Advanced Queue Management
The Advanced Queue Management toolkit is a module for inbound or outbound deployments, providing automated queue and class-of-service management combined with extended operator access to queue management.
In high-load situations, combining the IMP with the Advanced Queue Management toolkit allows automatic prioritized delivery of high-class traffic while ensuring continued delivery of low-class traffic. Different classes of traffic can be segregated with delayed or timed sending for lower classes of traffic.
Delivery to internal platforms can be maximized with automatic monitoring of load situations, ensuring maximum utilization without overburdening the systems. Operators can manually reorder, reroute and reschedule for timed delivery queues of outbound traffic to unavailable receiving systems or split them into new queues based on arbitrary message criteria.
Outbound traffic can be managed by recipient e-mail system, providing for differentiated queue behaviour for each recipient system. Recipient systems can be ordered by IP addresses, domains, destination groups or other, arbitrarily definable criteria. For each outbound queue multiple variables can be individually configured or dynamically set by the system depending on current network and queue situations or other parameters.
Benefits
- Lowered operations overhead and cost
- Maximized asset use of message store
- Extended life of messaging infrastructure
- Protected message store from traffic spikes
- Prioritized and protected high-value traffic
- Enabled new class-of-service products
- Significantly lower cost of managing outbound queues in high-volume environments
Classes of service can be defined based on IP source, sender, receiver or any information available in the workflow policy processor. Furthermore, the Advanced Queue Management toolkit along with content filters allows identification of otherwise unidentifiable bulk E-mail (newsletters, mailing lists, etc.) as a class of service.
Each class of service is assigned specific parameters such as different priority, maximum throughput, maximum volume etc. In turn, this can be combined with time window commands, such as assigning a specific time for delivery to send bulk E-mails only at night. Based on the class of service and the current load of each internal or external peer MTA (in messages/s, volume/s, response time, etc.), the filter decides to do one of the following:
- Send the message
- Store the message for later sending when the receiving MTAs are no longer overloaded
- Store the message for sending at a specific time
Automatic outbound queue management by destination is done through assigning characteristics to each queue. Criteria such as backoff algorithms, retries, queue thresholds and rerouting rules can be individually set for each queue and combined with dynamic and static rules for modifying queue behaviour. As a result, little or no operator intervention will be necessary in case of remote system failures on receiving platforms.
At any time, operators can manually modify queue behavior and manage E-mails in queues. A queue browser provides a powerful interface for an operator to select E-mails in any one or many queues based on a combination of regular expressions. Once selected, these E-mails can be moved to different queues, removed, rejected etc.
The Advanced Queue Management contains sophisticated load monitoring and balancing. Built-in feedback loops, dynamic thresholds and multi-system load balancing allow the IMP to equally and safely distribute an inbound messaging load over large numbers of divergent platforms. Failures of any one of the receiving systems can be automatically detected, resulting in policy-driven rerouting of the affected traffic and queues.
System Requirements
Advanced Queue Management only works with IMPs loaded with firmware OOS version 2.5 or newer.
Larger deployments should use Advanced Queue Management on O-series IMPs.
Differentiated Classes of Service