WatchGuard Readying New Quarantine Appliance For Interop
WatchGuard spoke with CRN Test Center about the new appliance, which is scheduled to be introduced at Interop IT Expo and Conference in Las Vegas later this month.
"In larger environments, you don't want all your spam on the corporate gateway. A separate box is what you want," said Michael Guild, a WatchGuard sales engineer during a visit to the Test Center this week. The new line will consist of enterprise and SMB models, and both will work with WatchGuard's XCS series of e-mail security appliances introduced in November. They also accept quarantined or unusually large messaged routed from third-party devices for further processing, according to Guild.
Discrete policies can be assigned to domains and/or users, Guild said, and users themselves also will be allowed to create their own black and white lists for the box. Reporting includes list activity, top quarantine users, CPU load and other system info, as well as spam digest messages, which can be customized through included HTML templates.
The advantage of dedicating a machine to quarantine is two-fold. The server off-loads storage and processing of suspicious messages for as many as 180,000 users, thereby boosting overall e-mail throughput and storage capacity, and also affords administrators a wider choice of processing and disposal options based on message date or available system capacity.
While the administrative quarantine capabilities of WatchGuard's XCS boxes might be sufficient for smaller organizations, Guild said that as a company grows, so too does its need for e-mail traffic processing. "If you're doing clustering, then you can only quarantine from a single e-mail domain," he said. With QMS, clustered boxes would simply steer quarantined messages to that the Quarantine Management Server for processing.
For the SMB, the QMS 500 will list for $5,500 and is designed for the XCS 170, 370 or 570 e-mail scanners. For the enterprise, the QMS 1000 lists for $13,500 and pairs with the XCS 770, 970 or 1170. Both QMS devices are capable of handling huge message volumes, Guild claimed, and will support an unlimited number of users and e-mail domains (which are limited on XCS devices alone). Look for CRN Test Center's exclusive hands-on look at the XCS 370, the mid-line SMB device, which lists for $5500.