Revenue from hosted corporate e-mail services alone will increase 44 percent – from $535 million to $769 million – between 2005 and 2009, according to The Radicati Group, which reports the installed base for hosted e-mail will grow 55 percent during the same time period. To capitalize on this growing opportunity, service providers must deliver scalable enterprise messaging services that can meet today’s needs for security, reliability and compliance. Instead of hosting Microsoft Exchange or an open-source messaging software like Postfix, service providers increasingly are looking to more robust and reliable platforms tailored to a service provider environment.
Quality Technology Services Inc., a technology infrastructure company based in Atlanta, has tried two different approaches with different results. With the acquisition of e^deltacom, the data center division of ITC^DeltaCom, in the fall of 2005, the company operates Hosted Exchange for several of its managed services clients as well as an appliance-based messaging solution from Mirapoint Inc. The Mirapoint solution supports 1.5 million messages per day and 55,000 users.
The greatest contrast between the two platforms is in the scalability, says Darryl Cox, senior systems engineer for QualityTech. “Scaling our existing Hosted Exchange infrastructure from 60 domains to 6,000 domains would prove too costly to implement and manage,” he says, highlighting the difficulty of an Exchange deployment in any service provider environment. “If I can limit the number of devices in a solution to a handful of special purpose, dedicated systems, I increase my chances for success. Our Hosted Exchange solution works well to address the specific needs of those customers, but for high-value ISP grade solutions, we recommend Mirapoint messaging appliances.”
QualityTech operates eight Mirapoint appliances that perform gateway, directory and/or storage functions. “You could run your gateway services, your LDAP directory services and your message storage on a single appliance,” Cox says. “As you grow, you can rededicate any Mirapoint appliance to one or more functions and pull the other functions out.”
QualityTech itself started with one e-mail appliance for the gateway and one for storage. As the amount of traffic increased, the company added another gateway appliance. As the queries and lookups increased, QualityTech pulled the database functions out of the message store appliances and put them on dedicated directory boxes. Once the messaging started to take off, the storage was put on other appliances. “It gives you more scalability [in contrast to a single host],” says Cox, adding that it affords QualityTech the flexibility to offer tailored services like disaster recovery to clients that already may be using other message servers. “The beauty of Mirapoint-powered gateway and directory services is they are independent of the back-end message store. We can provide directory services and gateway services for any message store whether it is Sendmail, Postfix, Mirapoint, or Exchange – it doesn’t matter.”
Another difference in the appliance-based approach is in the inherent security of the platform itself. While Microsoft Exchange runs on the frequently patched Windows operating system, which itself runs on a general purpose server, Mirapoint’s proprietary operating system has no known exploits and has never been hacked. And while open source options like Sendmail and Postfix also pose less of a risk than Exchange, they are not easily scalable or manageable in the service provider environment.
Cox says with Mirapoint as its vendor, QualityTech’s investment is in the solution – hardware, software and support – and less on the human capital to run it. “It’s difficult for one network administrator to manage a solution of this size using open source, though open source would obviously be much cheaper from a hardware/software standpoint. The human capital required to run open source would be more significant than what we have now,” he says, noting he would need additional engineers to maintain and run those systems concurrently. The difference, he explains, is that his messaging infrastructure costs are relatively fixed and predictable whereas hiring, training and retaining staff is variable.
Mirapoint charges QualityTech an annual license based on the number and size of appliances. It pays support fees based on the number of users and number of appliances. Subscription-based services, such as antivirus and antispam, are based on the number of users.
Radicati Group Inc.
www.radicati.com
Mirapoint Inc.
www.mirapoint.com
Quality Technology Services Inc.
www.qualitytech.com
Sendmail
www.sendmail.org
Postfix
www.postfix.org
Microsoft Corp.
www.microsoft.com
