Mirapoint revs up messaging appliance

E-mail vendor Mirapoint this week will announce an upgrade to its RazorGate messaging security appliance that has a smaller footprint but offers better performance and more storage capacity than the previous version, according to the company.

The appliance, which is available in three configurations to fit different-sized organizations, now offers 40% greater throughput and as much as 225GB of onboard storage, says Craig Carpenter, Mirapoint's director of corporate marketing. Mirapoint has shrunk the size of the appliance from a 3U chassis to 2U or 1U, which reduces the need for rack space and power, but has kept the price the same, Carpenter says.

The new RazorGate also has a setup wizard that requires minimal technical knowledge to get the appliance up and running, Carpenter adds.

These enhancements are designed to help Mirapoint compete for corporate customers against appliance makers such as Barracuda, CipherTrust, IronPort and Proofpoint.

Unlike those companies, Mirapoint also offers an e-mail server appliance, making it one of the few companies to have established itself in both the e-mail server and gateway markets. This distinction will become particularly important when Microsoft releases Exchange 12, which is expected to include some of the gateway security functions that Mirapoint and other messaging security companies offer, says Maurene Caplan Grey, principal analyst with Grey Consulting.

"Exchange 12 will include integrated edge services, and we're going to see this as a trend with other e-mail server-software packages, so Mirapoint is well ahead of the game," Grey says.

Another distinguishing point is that Mirapoint's e-mail server is offered only as an appliance and, although the messaging security market is full of appliances, this form factor is rare among e-mail server offerings, Grey adds.

"Not too many organizations really get the idea of a mailbox appliance," she says. "They're used to thinking about messaging as a piece of software that you install on your server and the system engineer takes pride in the fact that he can play with the software and tweak it."

For a function such as e-mail, however, which is moving from the application to the infrastructure level, "it's a commodity that they really shouldn't be futzing around with if it works," she says.

RazorGate includes anti-spam and anti-virus software; Mirapoint's connection-management technology, which drops connections from known spamming sources; junk-mail management tools for users; content filtering; and policy management features. It starts at $4,800 for 50 users.