E-mail systems have increasingly proved themselves vulnerable to
incapacitation by viruses and destruction by natural or man-made
disaster, but MessageOne has unveiled a "hot standby" technology
meant to let businesses route messages through offsite servers when
primary systems go down.
Emergency Messaging System (EMS) is the latest product from
MessageOne, founded four years ago by Adam Dell, younger brother of
hardware maker Michael Dell.
Traditionally focused on helping large organisations manage e-mail
services, MessageOne designed EMS after hearing its customers
complain about the need for reliable and affordable e-mail backup
systems, according to Michael Rosenfelt, vice-president of
marketing at MessageOne.
"They told us that they needed a high-availability solution, but
that existing systems were too costly or too hard to manage,"
Rosenfelt said.
Existing systems are costly because typically there must be a
backup e-mail server for each primary e-mail server for
emergencies, he said. High bandwidth connections are needed to tie
redundant sites to the corporate network and companies need
personnel to manage the additional hardware.
"Our customers told us they wanted a solution that was functionally
equivalent but structurally different from their primary systems,"
Rosenfelt said.
The EMS backup mail server relies on a specially designed core of
Linux and secure open-source technologies and can simultaneously
serve as a backup for multiple messaging servers using disparate
platforms.
To integrate the backup system, mail administrators modify their
company's Domain Name System (DNS) schema, adding the Internet
Protocol (IP) address of the EMS backup server as a low-level mail
exchange record that will be used if the other listed mail servers
are unavailable.
Hosted at a remote location and managed by the customer or by an
application service provider, the EMS server relies on a dedicated
application written in Microsoft's .NET framework, installed on a
Windows 2000 server at the customer's site to synchronise
information between the various messaging servers and the EMS
server, Rosenfelt said.