Where possible, we use open source technology. Not only is much open source technology of high quality, but the ability to modify, add to and change the source allows us to integrate changes that best suit our requirements and customers.
Where possible, we always try and contribute changes that we feel are generally useful back to the appropriate communities.
Our main servers are located at NYI in New York City, USA. Their facility is a high security, video monitored location; with backup power, airconditioning, and fire systems and 24x7x365 monitoring and onsite technical support
We were early adopters of the InnoDB table engine and have found it one of the best storage engines available. Good recoverability means that even after hard crashes, the database is in a sane state. Hot backups allow nightly snapshots of the database to be made and taken offsite. Clustered indexing allows us to organise our data in exactly the way we want to ensure user data is accessed quickly.
The main application is written in Perl using a custom web framework. To ensure as secure an application as possible, we run with taint mode enabled and also ensure all database queries use placeholder variables to avoid SQL injection attacks.
To reduce XSS style attacks, we use web sessions that require both a URL parameter and a cookie. Once you login, all URLs contain a "session salt" parameter. This parameter is required to determine which cookie is currently valid and in use. Either part alone is not enough, both are required to access a particular web session.
We have contributed a number of Perl modules we created back to CPAN for the Perl community to use. See ROBM, HOWARD and BRONG.
We maintain a small set of patches against Postfix that some people might find useful.
We maintain a quite large set of patches against the cyrus IMAP/POP server. Over time these patches are being accepted into the main cyrus code base as most of them are related to reliabilty, consistency and performance improvements.
All IBM, Sun and SATA-to-SCSI units are dual power supply and connected to separate power circuits. All circuits are monitored to ensure there's no over use that might trip a circuit breaker.
You can see a layout of our cabinets and some photos if you're really interested.