Novell Case Study

Messaging Architects' M+Guardian Protects Novell's Email Infrastructure Worldwide

Case Study

Client Since: 2003
Number of Users: 5000
Product: M+Guardian

Objective: Prevent spam and viruses from disrupting business, while reducing Help-Desk calls and reinforcing Novell’s Linux-based strategy

Summary

• M+Guardian prevents spam and viruses from disrupting business continuity
• Reduces management time and empowers helpdesk to address end-user requests more efficiently
• Reinforces the Linux-based strategic direction of Novell

Background

Novell, Inc. delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform as well as a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity, and risk. With its infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

For five years, Novell's line of defense against spam and email viruses has been the Guardian technology from Messaging Architects. The solution was introduced during the 2003 "Blaster" type virus storm which threatened Novell’s email system with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The virus was sent to non-existent Novell user IDs, which was causing the GroupWise Internet Agents (GWIAs) to read and reject close to 3,000,000 messages a day. As a consequence of the attack, the three inbound GWIA systems were choking under the load and there was a serious risk the entire email system would be disrupted.

Following an emergency deployment of GWGuardian, the problem disappeared immediately. Guardian’s automatic rejection of the invalid users virtually eliminated the DoS attack, allowing only valid connections to be processed. The protocol-level protection immediately reduced the number of messages bombarding the Novell GroupWise system by 80 percent. Since then, the Guardian appliance has been the secure email gateway that protects Novell’s Data Center at the Provo Hub, responsible for the email communications across Novell’s five major sites and other satellite offices worldwide.

Recently, the IS&T staff upgraded to M+Guardian, the Linux-based email firewall in Messaging Architects’ security and compliance suite.

Rolling Out M+Guardian to Novell’s 5,000 Users

The Novell GroupWise collaboration system has highly intensive activity. More than one million email messages enter the system on a daily basis. Just like most other large enterprises, more than 90 percent of these incoming messages are either spam or contain a virus and need to be rejected before they have a chance to bog down the email system.

When Messaging Architects released its completely redesigned Linux-based secure gateway appliance, Novell’s IS&T staff responsible for GroupWise decided to deploy it internally, not only because of the numerous performance improvements and enhanced scanning capabilities, but because the move corresponded to the company’s overall strategic direction to standardize on the Linux operating system.

Jamie Sanders, GroupWise Systems Support Engineer at Novell, talks about the implementation process, “When the Messaging Architects team came to us to discuss the deployment of M+Guardian, I have to admit I wasn’t anxious to undertake the change. Email is a business-critical application for Novell; practically all electronic communication is handled through the Guardian firewall. The GroupWise collaboration system is such a visible application, we couldn’t afford any disruptions of the system for even the shortest period of time. And the old product was doing the job quite well.”

After careful discussions and detailed configuration planning between Novell’s IS&T staff and Messaging Architects’ development and support teams, M+Guardian’s implementation was seamless. There was no disruption in the email flow, and there was a visible improvement in both performance and spam catch rates.

“M+Guardian features improved filtering capabilities,” explains Sanders. “Right after we deployed M+Guardian in production, our Service Desk was getting calls from employees worried that there might be a problem with the email system, as they weren’t getting any spam. Given the aggressiveness of spammers and the speed with which their techniques evolve, users were concerned when their in boxes contained only legitimate messages.”

M+Guardian offers a familiar interface through which end users can manipulate the spam trapped in their quarantine. Novell employees receive a daily quarantine report in their individual GroupWise inboxes for the new items in their personal quarantines. Right in the report, they can perform a number of actions on the messages, such as release, report, delete, or black or whitelist with a single click.

In addition, end users have the ability to log on to a web portal that gives them real-time access to their quarantine between the intervals the quarantine reports are sent out. This flexibility with respect to manipulating spam content blocked by M+Guardian not only empowers the end users, but also relieves the IT staff from the overhead of having to manage individual quarantines.

Jared Jensen, IT Manager Messaging and Collaboration at Novell, confirms these observations. “M+Guardian has certainly made our lives easier. The new and improved admin interface lets our helpdesk support end users more effectively. Transferring more responsibilities to the front-line support staff, in turn, has made the IS&T team members more productive and able to dedicate themselves to other strategic projects. Another advantage of this web-based administrative interface is that we do not have another client that we have to deliver and support to our end users, thus reducing our overall IT costs. All our end users are familiar with a web browser, which makes accessing this interface so easy.”

Protecting Novell’s GroupWise System with M+Guardian

The M+Guardian deployment at Novell followed the organization’s strict IT procedures for such implementations. A dedicated team of engineers from the Messaging Architects Provo office ensured a painless transition and optimal email traffic handling, taking into account the high volume of email going through the Novell GroupWise servers.

At Novell M+Guardian is deployed on an IBM System four-blade server, which meets the needs for scalability and fault-tolerance on the hardware side of things. The built-in Intel Xeon chip in the IBM System X servers enhances the application's superior performance.

The M+Guardian application leverages the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platform. The application uses Novell eDirectory as its main directory structure to ensure centralized, policy-based management.

According to Sanders, the move toward Linux on the back-end is definitely a positive shift. “There is a dramatic improvement in performance. With the previous version of Guardian, I had to check email queues, which I no longer need to do. The Linux platform has given the M+Guardian appliance better overall reliability. Since we completed the deployment, I’ve had to restart M+Guardian only for hardware updates. There are no crashes, unexpected reboots, or other OS-related issues. M+Guardian just keeps on working, in spite of the ever-growing volume of email.”

“Messaging Architects has been a strong Novell technology partner, and we appreciate their commitment to the Linux platform. The excellent performance and results we see in M+Guardian further validates the robust and stable development platform the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers,” adds Jensen. “Having M+Guardian deployed at our data center confirms the viability of Linux and further demonstrates how we are following Novell’s strategic direction on every level.”

Benefits of M+Guardian

Using Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology as its first-level protection against spam, viruses, and other blended threats has proved a successful choice for Novell since it was first introduced in 2003. For five years, Messaging Architects’ secure gateway has protected the Novell email infrastructure without a single breach.

The upgrade to M+Guardian brings significant benefits to the organization in terms of enhanced filtering capabilities with virtually zero latency, improved performance of the collaboration infrastructure, and a better alignment with Novell’s strategic direction toward Linux.

“Moving to M+Guardian was fairly easy for us and pretty much transparent to our end users,” stresses Sanders. “I can say to any organization contemplating a move to M+Guardian: Take the leap and switch, it’s a much improved system.”

“Another benefit of M+Guardian is the fact that it leverages Novell eDirectory, which has been consistently recognized as best-of-breed by industry analysts and trusted by customers for its scalability, compatibility, reliability, and security. All these components, combined with the intelligently layered policy-based anti-spam engine, make M+Guardian a standards-based, highly scalable, and secure solution suitable for organizations of any size and level of email traffic, including Novell,” concludes Jensen.

See all Case Studies