0

I am in the process of reviewing some email continuity solutions such as the one offered by Messagelabs. Solutions such as this are not cheap, however, I believe they reduce complexity when it comes to administration and serves as a feasible DR type solution for emails as opposed to purchasing a new server for DR purposes.

Have any of you had first hand experience using this service and what are your opinions and/or feedback?

Thanks in advance.

1
  • Just a heads up. We currently use MessageLabs for spam filtering and I'm extremely disappointed with their service (or lack of it). No matter how much they stuff up they will not take responsibility for their incompetence. Nor will they investigate issues caused by said incompetence. Apr 9, 2010 at 6:00

5 Answers 5

1

Keep it in house, and use Exch2k10 Database Availability Groups (DAGs). That's my 2p worth.

0

If you are looking at alternatives for MessageLabs, suggest considering Webroot who a lot of MessageLabs clients have switched to. They also offer email continuity far more economically and have a far more advanced faster service than MessageLabs.

0

The Messagelabs solution is actually based on the Dell MessageOne platform, which is why it's expensive as they're licensing it in...

Many moons ago I was a Messagelabs customer but left them for Email Systems (now Webroot) because of the inflexibility of the platform and bad customer service.... My best customer was down for a day because of them :( and we nearly lost the customer.

If you're looking for just a security solution to swap out Messagelabs- Webroot is a good option but they don't offer the continuity service I think you're after.

Have you had a look at Mimecast? I've recently joined Mimecast because they've got a brilliant technology- security, continuity and archive as a SaaS solution. You can give your email users 100% uptime- if your users are in outlook they won't notice any downtime because Mimecast continuity is integrated within Outlook.

I like Mimecast because it's privately owned, well funded and has brilliant technology which is all owned and fully integrated (no third party licensed / integrated).

I'm [email protected] or on twitter @justinpirie

I wish I'd had Mimecast when I was managing 200+ exchange servers it would have let me and my team sleep many more nights!

Best,

Justin

p.s. I was just chatting to my new colleagues that used to work at Messagelabs... apparently ML support is being integrated with Symantec support with predictable consequences :(

4
  • @Justin: Hey Justin, thanks for your post. I did look at Mimecast but I am not sure of the level of support they can offer since I am based in Hong Kong. Could you shed some light? MessageLabs continuity is also integrated within Outlook. Users have to run on cache mode and have some sort of "connector" with the MessageLabs servers/service. I believe this is the same sort of architecture driving mimecast? I also had a brief look at the Webroot site and like you mentioned, it is more geared towards security and not email continuity.
    – molecule
    Apr 9, 2010 at 10:07
  • @molecule Thanks for your reply- I'm an ex hong kong'r :) So in terms of support, we currently don't have APAC presence... but we do have 24/7/365 support. I've been digging around today and I think with MessageOne you're going to be supported either out of Australia or on the UK out of hours, but the actual service is on the UK datacentre, which is the same for us. Because the connectivity to HK is really good, supporting you out of the UK is no problem at all, in fact we've got branch offices of customers already there, and they love it ;) With MessageOne you need to (cont...)
    – Justin Pirie
    Apr 9, 2010 at 17:40
  • run a separate server alongside your exchange server, just for message one and manually activate it in a continuity event, with us there is no additional hardware and it automatically fails over and fails back without the user noticing. The MessageOne experience is nowhere near as seamless, because we have full MAPI integration, the user doesn't need to change the way they work or activate anything- it just works! In addition, the plugin we use to deliver continutity delivers google quality search results, not like Outlook's search... (cont)
    – Justin Pirie
    Apr 9, 2010 at 17:45
  • The other thing is because MessageOne is a third party piece of software, it needs lots of configuration... Honestly- why don't you give Mimecast a try? We offer a full 30 day money back guarantee, if you don't like it, we'll give you your money back. If you want to have a chat- give me a shout! Have a great weekend. Cheers, Justin
    – Justin Pirie
    Apr 9, 2010 at 17:49
0

We used Softscan (Danish company) wich worked great, until they got eaten by MessageLabs.

I think it's working OK. The only issue I have with them right now is that I manually have to upload new address lists to them to whitelist our own email adresses (else we get user non-existant etc). Hopefully they will provide LDAP over VPN or something like that in the future.

0

Disclaimer: I don't work for a messaging company of any type but am highly biased by my 15 years of experience managing the network (including email service) for medium sized businesses in the retail and utility sectors.

As of yet I have only moved email infrastructure the opposite way, from outsourced to in-house. Many products claim to reduce complexity, but in fact do not; they only hide the complexity. Many times when I have looked at proposed solutions, there is actually increased complexity based on the number of components in the system and the connection relationships. It now seems to be a growing trend that the "cloud" providers hide or make it very difficult to obtain a useful and detailed systems diagram. What I write about here will hopefully point people on what types of questions to ask when they are evaluating an outsourced messaging service.

In any case where a BC/DR strategy is being addressed, you will need to confront the fact that you just don't know how well a 3rd party or managed service will work no matter what the contract says. With an in-house solution, you can test the architecture in a lab environment and generate a deterministic list of the failure modes. 100% uptime is a misnomer; it does not exist. How will you test the functionality of the service before committing? Is there a record of downtime incidents? Public? What is the communications policy of the service when there is a disruption? What about when security related incidents happen, will you know about it? This should all be in the contract.

With email, you also have to consider where the email filtering is, how it is implemented, and how easily changes can be made to what is blocked. Many 3rd party email continuity solutions force you to change your MX record(s) to point at their gateways. What is their listing policy? Is the policy publicly available? What is the procedure and time-frame for making changes to the blocklist by you? By someone who is blocked? Is it actually possible? How do they measure the effectiveness of the filtering? What about false-positives?

The high-level view of email shows a system of many distributed queues. Create a diagram showing all the queues in a particular configuration and you will see were it will fail. How does the proposed solution stack up (consider the service as a single black box unless you know otherwise)?

Compare the service with a known and well tested in-house solution: In general, with Exchange, an in-house solution would involve a clustering setup with older versions or the DAG feature in 2010; this will likely mean at least 4 instances of Exchange. You combine that with a load balancer such as produced by F5 (high end) to achieve client continuity. Achieving messaging continuity with the Internet would involve setting up multiple Internet connections and multiple email gateways such as Ironport devices. All this is a serious investment of course, but run the numbers (including in-house talent) in comparison to these "cloud" solutions and you may be surprised at the value achieved with an in-house solution. BTW, there are much cheaper solutions than F5 and Ironport out there that give the same level of continuity. The outsource looks better to the smaller players here, but even so, with DAG and some Linux knowledge, a smaller shop can do pretty well.

At the end of the day, with any off-premise solution, there is the Internet connection to consider. Ask what the in-house messaging continuity scenario looks like if the Internet is not available.

Google the company and see if they've hired an SEO company to clean up their online image. You will be able to tell this is the case if all you see are links to the big industry magazines that just regurgitate press-releases and other worthless content like sponsored studies, whitepapers, and other corporate shills. It is always a plus if you can easily find discussion boards or email list archives with good and bad feedback about a company. Every company has bad, but the bad is better when you know what it is.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .