Proofpoint this week plans to announce a version of its e-mail security product for VMware virtual machine environments.
Slated for commercial release in the fourth quarter, Proofpoint’s Messaging Security Gateway for VMware will be available
as a download from Proofpoint’s Web site, says Andres Kohn, vice president of product management. Customers will receive the
same spam and virus protection and content control as users of Proofpoint’s appliances and software modules, he says, while
benefiting from the advantages of a virtual environment.
Those benefits include cost reduction. Running Proofpoint’s e-mail security product on a partition of an existing server
as opposed to buying a new appliance represents upfront savings plus those realized from taking advantage of an existing resource,
Kohn says. Customers would also save money by not having to rack, cool and power an additional device.
A virtual appliance also can be up and running in the time it takes to download the program, vs. having to install and configure
a dedicated appliance, Kohn adds. Backup and recovery are simplified by using VMware’s infrastructure management tools to
take and restore snapshots of an entire environment.
“I think the notion of virtualization makes a lot of sense and offers more reliability and redundancy than a traditional appliance,”
says Richard Cummins, director of the technology services group at Community Medical Centers in Fresno, Calif., which uses
Proofpoint appliances. “We just did a study and determined that it costs us $5,000 per server per year to maintain a server
in the data center. That number alone is compelling enough to pursue virtualization for some applications.”
|
