Business Packages E-Mail Gateway as a Virtual Appliance To Vastly Improve E-Mail Availability

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Author: JT Smith

HERNDON, Va., June 27, 2007 – A Vienna, Austria-based software company has greatly improved the availability of its e-mail gateway software by using OpenVZ operating system virtualization to rapidly move the software – live and on-the-fly – between servers.

Proxmox, Inc. offers its e-mail gateway software — Mail Gateway — as an OpenVZ virtual appliance. This extension to the Proxmox product line helps reduce service disruptions potentially experienced by its customers. Also, as part of its High Availability (HA) Cluster, Proxmox created a special software utility to make periodic snapshots of OpenVZ virtual environments to help automate the backup procedure. Combined, these functions deliver high availability for customers as an extra measure against e-mail downtime.

“Lots of software programs could benefit the same way with OpenVZ virtualization technology,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. “Proxmox is a great example of how software developers can easily enhance their products with our open source technology.”

Proxmox builds Mail Gateway software that is used by customers worldwide in all kinds of businesses, ranging from those with just with a few e-mail users to companies with several thousand e-mail accounts. The Proxmox mail gateway is appropriate for businesses running their own e-mail servers, as well as Internet providers. The mail gateway product is and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish languages.

“We recommend running OpenVZ with our mail gateway for all people running Linux systems,” said Martin Maurer, CEO of Proxmox.

“We found OpenVZ is absolutely the best performing and most stable virtualization technology available today for Linux,” said Maurer. “In our experience, VMware Server is ideal for testing and for low traffic sites and VMware ESX is also suitable running high-performance environments, but it is never as fast as OpenVZ due to the low overhead of operating system virtualization technology. We tried Xen, but it is not yet stable like OpenVZ.”

Maurer said the company plans to build on its experience with OpenVZ software and will offer the next version of its e-mail gateway product as a virtual appliance for the SWsoft Virtuozzo software used by enterprises. OpenVZ open source software is the basis for the SWsoft Virtuozzo virtualization software product. Customers will benefit from additional Virtuozzo management function.

Proxmox Mail Gateway
There are different licensing options available that include a free version of the Proxmox Mail Gateway, along with:

Standard
Professional (special terms for educational, government users)
High Availability (HA) Cluster (special terms for educational, government users)

More information can be found at www.proxmox.com.

About the OpenVZ Project
The OpenVZ project (http://openvz.org) freely distributes and offers support to its users, promoting operating system virtualization through a collaborative, community effort. Supported by SWsoft, the OpenVZ project serves the needs of the community developers, testers, documentation experts, and other technology enthusiasts who wish to participate in and accelerate the technology development process.

Since going into full production late in 2005, the OpenVZ project has been very active with the user community with more than 14,000 message posts on its support Forum. The OpenVZ website attracts tens of thousands of visitors each month as more businesses and individuals explore and contribute to the leading open source operating system virtualization project.

About OpenVZ Software
OpenVZ is operating system server virtualization software technology, built on Linux, which creates multiple isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers ensure that applications do not conflict and can be re-booted independently.

With the power of today’s processors, hardware is often under utilized. With virtualization technology, the server can effectively be split into many small ones, each running its tasks so that the whole server is utilized more efficiently.

OpenVZ software can be used to help consolidate servers and increase server utilization rates, or for creating “sandboxes” for test and development, or when sharing resources so that every user can have root access while being kept isolated from each other.

The OpenVZ software comes with user tools that help automate management of virtual servers. With its unique architecture that uses a single operating system instance, the virtual servers perform and execute like independent servers with their own memory, configuration files, users and applications. Using template-based application deployment provides a simple way to get new virtual servers up and running in minutes and OpenVZ can run several times more virtual servers per CPU than other virtualization technologies. Also, the OpenVZ project maintains a blog site discussing virtualization technology, which can be accessed here, http://blog.openvz.org.

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