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- IMail Hits New-Feature Trifecta
- Port80 Adds ZipEnable to IIS 6 Management Toolbox
- IBM Brings Supercomputing Option to SMBs
This week: Ipswitch took IMail to 8.1 and added improved antispam, antivirus, and groupware capabilities; Port80 Software released ZipEnable, software for deploying and managing IIS 6.0 native HTTP compression on Windows Server 2003; and IBM unwrapped a collection of prepackaged and pretested cluster configurations for the SMB space.
IMail Hits New-Feature Trifecta
Enhancements in latest release of IMail server span the three most hottest areas: antispam, antivirus, and groupware. Despite the decimal point in its name, version 8.1 is a major upgrade, John Korsak, messaging product marketing manager for Ipswitch, told ServerWatch.
Ipswitch’s newest weapons in its antispam arsenal are word normalization (which strips e-mail subject lines of letter-separating punctuation before running the message through the spam filters), advanced white list filtering (which lets the admin designate trusted IP addresses, domains, and e-mail addresses to be automatically skipped during spam checks), single message identification (which makes it easier to track a message as it passes through various tests and processes), and subject line modification (whereby messages flagged as spam can now include a warning in the subject line, thus leaving the choice of whether to quarantine or delete the message up to the end user).
On the antivirus front, Ipswitch added a second-tier antivirus module. IMail Anti-Virus Standard Edition is being marketed to enterprises that need virus protection but don’t necessarily need real-time updates or e-mail scans on multiple servers and are more price conscious. The technology, Korsak noted, is licensed from Softwin.
IMail 8.1 also adds a host of collaboration-oriented enhancements, Korsak said: shared calendaring with Outlook clients via a module, group scheduling through the vendor’s WS_FTP Server offering, and global address lists that are managed in the core product using Open LDAP.
Other new features in IMail 8.1 include OpenSSL and a control list accessed via IMAP.
The product is available for immediate download.
Port80 Adds ZipEnable to IIS 6 Management Toolbox
Port80 Software, which develops Web server tools for Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS), this week released ZipEnable, software for deploying and managing IIS 6.0 native HTTP compression on Windows Server 2003.
The tool uses HTTP compression to take advantage of IIS 6.0’s built-in compression on Windows Server 2003. With HTTP compression, less data is sent per Web transaction, reducing bandwidth costs and enhancing Web site usability through faster page loads.
In IIS 6.0, HTTP compression is embedded into the core Web server code, making compression very fast and efficient. However, it is also complex. ZipEnable aims to simplify the installation, configuration, and compression process by managing it at the global, site, directory, and file levels.
Administrators can configure compression on a full range of static and dynamic file types. The software installs quickly, with a
small memory footprint and no server performance impact. It also includes a wizard for rapid multisite compression deployment.
ZipEnable supports all versions of Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and is available for a free 30-day trial download. A single server license is priced from $49.95. Discounted multiserver licenses are available by request.
IBM Brings Supercomputing Option to SMBs
At ClusterWorld in San Jose, IBM unwrapped its Departmental Supercomputing Solutions, a collection of prepackaged, pretested cluster configurations for the SMB space. The solutions seek to deliver easy to manage, high performance at an affordable price.
In a nutshell, the Supercomputing Solutions are comprehensive cluster packages offered in a variety of configurations to meet the needs of smaller organizations. Each cluster consists of servers devoted to running applications, a management server to administer cluster resources, and a network interconnect to allow communication between the servers. The systems are packaged and tested as a cluster prior to shipping.
Three packages running Linux or Windows are available:
- IBM eServer Blade Center HS20 contains up to 14 dual Intel Xeon processor blade servers in a 7U chassis.
- IBM eServer xSeries 335 contains a dual Intel Xeon processor server in a 1U rack-optimized form factor.
- IBM eServer 325 contains a dual AMD Opteron processor server in a 1U rack-optimized form factor.
The servers are combined with the IBM eServer xSeries 345 management server, which is the single point of administration for all cluster resources. The xSeries345 communicates with the other servers in the cluster over a highly secure Ethernet virtual LAN. Each Departmental Supercomputing Solution also has a separate Gigabit Ethernet VLAN to interconnect the servers for application internode communications and a terminal server network for remote console applications.
A variety of high-performance computing software tool vendors have stepped up to the plate to support the new solutions.
