RSA '07: Mirapoint puts e-mail security appliance on a blade

E-mail vendor Mirapoint on Monday announced plans to release a version of its RazorGate e-mail security appliance that slides into IBM’s BladeCenter.

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Slated for availability during the second half of the year, RazorGate on IBM’s BladeCenter will offer all the e-mail security features of Mirapoint’s stand-alone RazorGate appliance, but with the scalability, low power consumption, and space-saving benefits of a blade server, says Bethany Mayer, Mirapoint’s chief marketing officer. Mirapoint will demonstrate the RazorGate blade at RSA Conference 2007 this week.

Mirapoint’s target customers are mostly large enterprises and ISPs that already take advantage of blade servers, or are considering moving to them, Mayer says. “The consolidation in the data center is real, and large customers are very interested in having appliance vendors consider the possibility of taking their appliances and putting them onto someone else’s platform,” she says.

One analyst says turning an e-mail appliance into a blade offers large enterprises room to grow.

“If you look at the form factor of blades, you can get much higher density than with regular appliances,” says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. This addition to its product line should help Mirapoint win over more large customers looking to consolidate products, he says.

RazorGate includes antispam and antivirus software; Mirapoint's connection-management technology, which drops connections from known spamming sources; junk-mail management tools for users; inbound and outbound message content-filtering; and policy management features. RazorGate can scan more than 25 million e-mail messages per day, Mayer says.

Mirapoint says it’s the first e-mail security company to come out with a blade version of its product, but the company isn’t alone in believing that enterprises are looking to clean up the appliance clutter in their data centers. Last year, Proofpoint released a virtualized version of its e-mail security appliance.

Mirapoint competes with e-mail security-appliance vendors including Secure Computing, Tumbleweed Communications, Barracuda Networks, and IronPort, which Cisco announced plans to acquire last month.

Like its stand-alone compliance counterpart, RazorGate for IBM’s BladeCenter will be priced starting at $4,800 for 50 users.