MXtreme now industry's first mail firewall to deliver zero downtime, latency, message loss

Although enterprises have deployed perimeter point solutions to deal with the incessant onslaught of spam and virus attacks, these systems are inadequate in assuring timely message delivery or protection against the possible of loss of e-mail due to overloading or outright system failure.

SecureData, a member of the JSE-listed ERP.com Group, the exclusive southern African distributor for BorderWare Technologies, today announced that the latter has introduced HALO (High Availability Load Optimisation), a failsafe clustering architecture for high availability for the MXtreme Mail Firewall appliance.

MXtreme's HALO takes a significant step forward by applying data centre operational disciplines to e-mail, making it the first e-mail security product capable of delivering zero downtime, latency and message loss.

"As enterprises continue to increase their dependence on e-mail as the most mission-critical communications platform, IT groups must ensure that their messaging infrastructure remains secure, reliable and always available," commented Matt Cain, senior Vice-President, META Group. "In nearly all cases, perimeter e-mail gateways are single systems that offer minimal fault-tolerance."

MXtreme HALO is a carrier-grade failsafe clustering architecture for high availability that enables two or more MXtreme systems to act as a single logical unit for processing e-mail messages. It supports high availability through its unique security, cluster management, load balancing and optimisation, and patent-pending 'stateful failover' capabilities, ensuring that mail messages are never lost due to security vulnerabilities or individual system failures. Systems can also be added or removed from clusters without interruption to the overall service.

Security - MXtreme is the most secure e-mail firewall available, and is currently being certified under the Common Criteria at EAL4 (Evaluation Assurance Level), a level of security usually only attained by network firewalls. This high level of security ensures that the system's reliability cannot be compromised by malicious attack, such as denial of service attacks, buffer-overflows, malware or other attacks.

Cluster management - MXtreme's centralised management allows administrators to manage MXtreme clusters and to synchronise configuration settings across all systems in the cluster. Combined reports and e-mail database searches may be derived from clustered systems.

Specific features include:

* Cloning - This function allows systems to be added to clusters and to assume the configuration of a defined 'master' system.

* Cluster Synchronisation - Systems within a cluster can be tied to the defined 'master' system. Any changes to the configuration of the master are reflected in the configuration of all systems in the cluster.

* Centralised management - Where tight clustering is not desirable, MXtreme's centralised management scheme can be employed. This allows the administrator to propagate settings from a defined master to cluster members.

* Cluster reporting - MXtreme has the most comprehensive reporting of any e-mail firewall system, providing statistics on all aspects of e-mail handling, spam, viruses and system health. MXtreme also maintains a detailed database of all e-mail that has passed through the system. MXtreme reports can be generated for a single system or for all systems in a cluster. The e-mail database can be searched by system or by cluster. The history and status of any message can be instantly retrieved regardless of which system processed the message.

Load balancing and optimisation - A basic requirement of high availability is to have an automated or semi-automated mechanism for switching the mail stream between available systems in the cluster, depending on their individual availability or health. BorderWare has been working with network traffic management vendors, such as F5 Networks, to enable high availability and intelligent load balancing. For example, customers that deploy F5's BIG-IP with MXtreme will realise benefits as the two products intelligently 'communicate'. BIG-IP can check for system health, traffic flow and current loads on any MXtreme system before forwarding SMTP traffic to it.

'Stateful failover'- Regardless of whether round robin or load balancers are used, high availability cannot be achieved unless the data itself can be protected against loss. If a system in a cluster should fail after it has received a message but before it has delivered it, that message will be lost forever. This is a function of queuing, and all SMTP store-and-forward relays are subject to the same vulnerability. As mail volumes have increased, this vulnerability has grown, and the number of messages that may be in this state - received but not yet delivered - can easily climb into the thousands.

MXtreme delivers a unique solution to this problem with 'stateful failover', a patent-pending process that replicates queues and intelligently synchronises messages to a defined mirror system within a cluster. A 'heartbeat' connection between multiple MXtreme systems within the cluster ensures that if any system should fail, the mirror system will deliver its messages.