The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway P840 (v5.0) had excellent overall anti-spam performance, third in filtering and fifth in false positives, with a fair number of bulk false positives, but more than 97 per cent of spam caught. And the feature set is extensive, including application-layer firewall features for the back-end mail server, policy-based encryption, and capable outbound content protection.
The BorderWare Security Platform (v7.1), running on the SP-800 appliance, had the worst false positive performance of any product tested, and by a large margin: nine critical false positives and 171 bulk false positives. Its filtering rate was 96 per cent of spam caught, an acceptable number but below the median. To reduce the false positives, you'll need to count on a training period of several weeks during which users inspect the quarantine carefully and whitelist the senders from whom they want to receive e-mail.
The Secure Computing IronMail E-Mail Gateway E2000 (v6.5.2) came in second in filtering performance, with 98 per cent of spam stopped, but placed eighth in false positives. The E2000 offers excellent capabilities in all other areas, with a wide range of secure content management features including scanning within attachments, policy-based rules for enforcing compliance, and pre-built rules for social security numbers, credit card numbers, and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA (Gramm-Leach Bliley), and HIPAA.
E-mail security continues to be a hot-button issue for IT administrators, who now find more moving parts in mail security solutions than they did just a couple of short years ago. Fighting viruses and spam were the original spurs for creating e-mail security appliances, and anti-spam is still the most important component of mail security. But the solutions have evolved to meet a host of additional requirements. These include securing connections between users, both internal and external; preventing loss of corporate data; stopping new types of threats such as phishing, spyware, and other types of malware; and blocking DoS and other network attacks as well as some application-layer attacks on mail servers.
An e-mail server can stop delivering e-mail for several reasons: a loss of Internet connectivity, a hardware failure, an operating system crash, an e-mail server software crash, or a corruption of the database that stores the messages. The traditional backup-and-restore process can take hours to resurrect a server, and any mail that comes in while the server is down will be lost. As a result, not surprisingly, many organizations demand CDP (continuous data protection) for e-mail.
Novell's OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0 is not actually a new product, but a weaving together of existing ones.
As SANs expand, it's not uncommon for a significant portion of switch ports to be consumed by connections to other switches. This is due not only to the relatively low port counts of typical FC (Fibre Channel) switches, but also because of the need for higher speed interconnects, which are often achieved by bonding multiple ports together.
Developers working on Web applications face the same challenges other developers do in ensuring app functionality and usability. But the nature of the Web means that the number of users on a given Web site may vary by several orders of magnitude, which should make load testing a priority.