Hermes: clustering users in large-scale e-mail services

Hermes is an optimization engine for large-scale enterprise e-mail services. Such services could be hosted by a virtualized e-mail service provider, or by dedicated enterprise data centers. In both cases we observe that the pattern of e-mails between employees of an enterprise forms an implicit social graph. Hermes tracks this implicit social graph, periodically identifies clusters of strongly connected users within the graph, and co-locates such users on the same server. Co-locating the users reduces storage requirements: senders and recipients who reside on the same server can share a single copy of an e-mail. Co-location also reduces inter-server bandwidth usage. We evaluate Hermes using a trace of all e-mails within a major corporation over a five month period. The e-mail service supports over 120,000 users on 68 servers. Our evaluation shows that using Hermes results in storage savings of 37% and bandwidth savings of 50% compared to current approaches. The overheads are low: a ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CLOUD
• Authors: Thomas Karagiannis, Christos Gkantsidis, Dushyanth Narayanan, Antony I. T. Rowstron
• Keywords: CLOUD 2010, Distributed And Parallel Computing, E-mail Service, Hermes, Implicit Social Graph