FLORIDA INTEGRATOR AND INTERNET SPECIALIST OBTAINS 99.99544% UPTIME WITH IPSWITCH IMAIL SERVER ON CLUSTERED PLATFORM
Company: Computer Point
Industry: Specialized software applications development, web design and development and web hosting.
Business challenge: Find a web-based email solution that is secure, affordable, scalable and can be provided by clustered servers that minimize downtime via failover safeguards.
Outcome: Since implementing Ipswitch IMail Server, Computer Point's 300+ web clients have experienced a total of two hours of downtime in five years, and these 120 minutes had nothing to do with IMail.
Computer Point is a seven employee, ten-year-old Jacksonville, Florida-based developer of highly specialized software applications as well as a leading regional developer of websites that the company also hosts. Specializing in service and repair, the Company has created a line of applications with a focus on financial integration and online service. In addition, Computer Point offers web hosting and website design.
“We give our clients an advantage over the competition by keeping them on the cutting edge of technology,” said Don Might, co-founder. “We help them plan for the future with innovative ideas about software, networking, and computer systems that will grow with them and their businesses. Our commitment is to help them bridge the gap between technology and business while striving to achieve the highest possible levels of customer satisfaction.”
In addition to wanting a reliable, cost-effective web-based email solution it could offer its clients as part of an overall web design and hosting service, Computer Point also wanted a product with the power, scalability and security features appropriate for its broad range of clients. Security, in particular, was of chief importance to the firm not only from their user's perspective but also to the Company. The email solution had to offer ways to safeguard the Company's administration of the total solution hosted on a pair of clustered servers with failover capabilities at the firm's headquarters.
“Availability is very important to our users,” Might said. “We wanted an email solution along with a systems hosting approach that would deliver the highest availability possible.”
Five years ago, after a thorough review of all available alternatives, Don Might decided that IMail Server offered the best solution. The product has been regularly upgraded since then to offer even more of what people like Don Might look for in a secure email solution. IMail Server Secure Edition, for example, combines standards-based messaging protocols with carrier-grade anti-virus protection powered by Symantec® Scan Engine and language-aware, automatically updated anti-spam technology from Mail-Filters™. That means this product achieves new levels of integrated protection for critical messaging systems. Ipswitch's choice of Mail-Filters anti-spam system, for example, enables a unique combination of machine and human intelligence that catches 95% of spam and reduces false positives to just one in 400,000 messages. The Mail-Filters data center pushes updated “Bullet Signatures” to the IMail system every 10 minutes, giving administrators the freshest and strongest anti-spam protection without their having to lift a finger.
“IMail has been the perfect product solution for us,” said Might. “We selected it for its features, its power, its security for our web hosting environment and because the price was right. We looked at a bunch of options in the beginning all the way from Microsoft® Exchange to all sorts of offerings over the Internet and across all kinds of businesses with an eye out for the best small and medium-sized business solution.”
Might continued, “In five years, for approximately 300 clients, thanks to IMail and our clustered server approach with automatic failover, we've experienced two hours of down time.” That's two hours out of 43,800 hours, for an uptime stat that may be worthy of the record books: 99.99544.
Might uses Microsoft Clustering Services to run a two node cluster linked by a shared small computer system interface (SCSI) bus with all mailboxes on a shared disk linked directly to the file system; only one IMail is actually looking at the file system at any given time. Might has set up an SQL group and an IMail group and each has a physical address, permissions for modification and authorization to set which IMail is the 'live' one. In this way, to configure a registry replication, for example, Computer Point can take IMail 1 offline and it completely copies to the IMail 2 registry and then takes IMail 1 down. Once IMail 1 is back up, then the IMail 2 registry is copied back to IMail 1.
Asked if the IMail product is still the best around, Might says, “I don't look at competitive products anymore... haven't since we started using IMail five years ago.” Asked if he's been satisfied with Ipswitch Technical Support, he says, “I haven't had any occasion to need it. I never had to ask a single question about IMail.”
