Category Archive: Statistics

Jan 22

Yet more spam filtering…

Banned IPs per Day

I feel I’ve written a bit too much about spam filtering recently… but nonetheless, here’s one more, only with some graphs and maps! Attacks against our mail servers have not stopped since my last update – they’ve increased – but despite this, we’ve had very little spam (I won’t go as far as to say …

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Jan 14

More Statistics

Just over a year ago (in fact one of our first posts!) we posted some statistics about our estate and infrastructure. Here’s an update on where we are, plus some new stats: Our data centre is now mostly virtual. We have 68 VMware servers and 4 Solaris virtualisation hosts, running nearly 1200 virtual machines. Including …

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Nov 06

Spam Filtering Update

We’ve had a full month of our new edge SMTP service in place now so I thought I’d do a very quick post taking a look at how well it had performed in the last four weeks. Firstly the positive: 190,203 (!) attempts to send messages without authenticating A sum total of 430,431 (!!!) attempts …

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Jun 27

Exam Results Release

If you’re a student, it almost certainly hasn’t escaped your attention that this semesters exam results were released recently. This is one of the busiest points in the year for a couple of our services as almost all University of Southampton students try to access their results at the same time, whether it by logging …

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Feb 17

Blackboard Performance Update

Average Hourly Logins against Hour of Day

It’s been two months since we moved Blackboard to the new data centre and performed the various hardware upgrades (see the post we made about that here), so it’s about time that we take a look at how the service has performed since it went live, and how it coped with the demand of the …

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Mar 08

Interesting Statistics

To start us off then, here are some interesting statistics that we recently gathered: Our data centre holds around 1500 servers, over half of which are virtual machines. Our primary filestore cluster holds over 126TB of data, of which 90TB is user files, 27TB is shared/resource data, and 7TB is backups. On an average week, …

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