Options Grow for Virtualized Environments

It is generally accepted that interest in virtualization, which breaks the one-application-per-server model allowing one machine to perform multiple functions simultaneously, will continue to grow in 2009. When Osterman Research, Inc., conducted its Messaging Virtualization Market Trends, 2008-2011 research, it found reducing costs and improving disaster recovery/ business continuity were the primary reasons for deploying messaging virtualization. According to the report, “Other important reasons to deploy virtualization, cited by roughly three in five organizations as a driver or major driver include: optimizing the IT infrastructure to make it easier to add additional capacity to existing services and to reduce the cost of IT labor.”

With its strong ROI appeal, virtualization is garnering a lot of attention. It is hard to predict, however, how fast adoption of virtual messaging will happen. As the Osterman report notes only 34 percent of those decision makers polled had a modest understanding of how virtualization could be used for email server applications. The report also states, “nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers are no more than modestly aware of the existence of commercial or open-source virtual appliances for messaging functions.” There are, of course, messaging security vendors offering virtual solutions.

For example, Proofpoint Inc., while it did not develop the first messaging security appliance for the virtual environment, was one of the first to not be open source. “Proofpoint got into the virtual market because we were using VMware in our own test environment,” reveals Keith R. Crosley, director of corporate communications for Proofpoint, Inc. “Every time you have a new build, it’s a hassle to install it on an actual physical appliance. As part of the QA process we started building virtual appliances to test because this really wasn’t about the hardware. It was about looking at the application layer for something that was eventually going to be deployed on a hardware appliance. Virtualization turned out to be a great way to deploy Proofpoint. We have definitely seen a lot of interest.”

Like other messaging security vendors, Proofpoint started out by offering a software product and then introduced an appliance. “Very quickly most of our customer-base shifted to using the appliance product and really liked the plug and play hardened secure appliance,” explains Nithin Rao, senior product manager of Proofpoint, Inc. “What we were able to do with the virtual appliance was to give customers the best of the both. So basically you have a virtual appliance with all the benefits of security and the hardening of the appliance—the combined hardware/software package—but it still gives the customer the flexibility to control their own infrastructure. At the same time, you are not committed to a box you have to rack and stack at your data center. The customer can control their infrastructure and better use their own infrastructure and get all the cost savings of having that type of control.”

[ header = Vendors See Benefits Too ]

Vendors See Benefits Too

Spam Titan, based in Ireland, started out in 2004 offering a gateway product, but found being a small company made for some challenges to selling a hardware appliance to their graphically disbursed customers. “The expense associated with delivering, deploying, selling and supporting hardware appliances over a large geographic area was very high,” recalls Ronan Kavanagh CEO of Spam Titan. “A typical example was if a company in the U.K. wanted to try a box, we would physically have to deliver and set up the box, and absorb the cost to do it. With the messaging security market space crowded, we found a similar experience with resellers in trying to get them to take the product on. As our customers moved further into Europe, these costs only increased.” Spam Titan also desired more business in the U.S. and there were costs associated with being able to do that as well.

By 2006 Spam Titan began looking at virtualization, which coincided with VMware looking for applications to run in its environment. “We got involved with VMware in the very early stage of the Virtual Appliance Certification Program,” says Kavanagh. “We are one of the few companies that have followed VMware Certified Virtual Appliance Program to their VMware Ready Virtual Appliance Program, which means we have been tested by VMware to ensure that our product works with their entire suite of products.”

Virtualization has not only caught the interest of established messaging vendors, but also the imagination of other companies that develop and offer products only for the virtualized environment. Unison Technologies, headquartered in New York, is such a company. Launched in August, Unison is a new approach to unified communications (UC). It is a software solution in two parts: Unison Server, which unifies all major communications in a single Linux-based server; and Unison Desktop, a single desktop client—for either Windows or Linux—that handles all communication for end users. “The server handles telephony and PBX functionality; instant messaging; email; calendar and group scheduling; contacts and address book; user presence—everything in one,” states Rurik Bradbury, CMO Unison Technologies, Inc. “The desktop client also does everything in one, so that not only can you email people, you can also click on them and start a phone call or IM conversation. So everything is in one place, not only for the end user at the desktop, but also for IT people in the back.”

Unison is on premise at the moment, but has plans to offer a hosted version later this year. There are two different models. “The first is what we call ‘sponsor-supported’ which is licensed at no cost, if ads will be accepted inside the desktop client and the admin panel,” explains Bradbury. “The other version is a paid license where there are no ads, which is $50 USD per user, per year. So companies can either choose to have it for free, and with the bad economy many find appealing these days, or they can switch to a paid license with no ads.” At the moment, many customers are using the free version, but Bradbury feels that might change over time. “Unison hasn’t been around for many years, so people are testing it out. I think we will have a better sense of the split between the free and licensed models in six to 12 months.”

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Virtualization Platform

When it comes to developing applications for the virtual environment, many like Proofpoint and Spam Titan are for VMware. VMware is the market leader in virtual infrastructure software. According to IDC, VMware revenue share (as of mid-last year) was 78 percent of the virtualization market. VMware launched its hardware certification program in 2000 to enable VMware and its hardware partners to fully test and optimize their products for VMware Infrastructure. “As our customers move to run VMware Infrastructure across all of their systems, there’s an increased diversity of server and storage platforms on which they prefer to deploy. One of the core benefits of VMware Infrastructure is that it provides customers the ability to choose across a broad and unique array of hardware products,” says Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. Hardware vendors seeking VMware certification first need to enroll in the VMware Technology Alliance Program. Upon membership, VMware and the vendor then conduct an analysis of the product to ensure it meets basic compatibility criteria.

Spam Titan chose the VMware platform because of its market share and because it offers more partner resources. “They are probably the company that has dedicated the most resources,” believes Kavanagh. “If you go to the VMware Web site, for example, they have a significant number of resources dedicated to virtual appliances and the promotion of virtual appliances. Unlike some of the other virtualization products out there, although some are starting to do it, but not to the extend that VMware has.” VMware offers online e-marketing tools, template-based demand generation campaigns, content syndication, RSS feeds and its VMware partner portal. The VMware VIP Partner Program also offers sales and marketing tools in localized versions. But Kavanagh expects that in the future Spam Titan may offer other virtual platforms. “It is an area that we are looking at,” he concedes. “There are others out there and it is to our advantage and to our customer’s advantage to be able to support those.”

Unison is built on the Parallels platform. “Parallels is big in the hosting industry,” reports Bradbury. “A large majority of Web hosting companies are using the Parallels platform, so we are talking to hosters about our offering. On the client side, Parallels is also often used for Mac software, because it allows you to run Windows on a Mac. They also have quite a bit of business for Parallels Virtuozzo, which is a competitor of VMware and Citrix Zen.” Parallels Virtuozzo Containers allows users to parcel up the operating system and hardware into virtualized ‘containers’ for efficient deployment and more energy-efficient use of resources. “The way it splits single operating systems across multiple virtual machines is unlike for example VMware, where each virtual machine has its own operating system. It is actually a slightly different take on virtualization,” explains Bradbury.

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Target Customer

Is there a trend on who is buying virtual? “I do not think there is a strong trend there. It is pretty much across the board on all verticals and all company sizes,” responds Rao. Adds Crosley, “Going into virtualization, we thought this would be for a mid- to large-sized organization. But there are a lot of small guys—50-person organizations, with a two-person IT shop—running everything on VMware. It is really interesting.”

Unison also found SMB organizations tend to opt for virtualization. “We tend to define SMB broadly, 10 to 2000 seats,” says Bradbury. “Our sweet spot is probably 50 to 300 seats. I am surprised at the number of people that have heard of Unison in a relatively short time. We have about 6,000 companies testing Unison, most using the sponsored version. So that is a high uptake in a relatively short period.” Bradbury goes on to say his expectation is that virtualized UC will mostly be adopted by the Web hosting community, “If you are an IT manager inside a company you probably do not need multiple different unified communications servers, you just need one. We have had a lot of interest. The hosting industry is excited about the free licenses. They are used to paying what they see as being taxes on various pieces of software like Windows Server or Microsoft Exchange licenses, which can add up to a lot.” Recently, Ferris Research was commissioned by Unison to do a study on these costs. In The TCO of Microsoft UC, November 2008 the report found—assuming a company with 500 staff—that the total cost of Microsoft unified communications licenses over three years is $278,949 USD. According to Bradbury, given its target market, Microsoft has created a UC platform that takes a great deal of work to deploy. With multiple servers and server roles to set up across three different systems—Exchange Server 2007, Communications Server 2007, and Active Directory—it is not something that most SMBs can economically adopt. “Our focus is on the SMB range. Enterprises also tend to have a lot of complexity, historical legacy applications; it is difficult to bring a new solution to them. Instead, we are going for more of the open territory of the SMB-space.”

For Spam Titan, it sees customers coming from three specific areas. Says Kavanagh, “Thirty-percent of our customers come from the people using managed mail product (ISPs that are Web hosting services in the cloud). This is a growing market space for us and we have made alterations to the product functionality for them. Seventy-percent of our customers come from the SMB space, which for us is from 10 to 250 users. The third area is education, colleges, etc. While Spam Titan still offers its original product, the virtual side of the business is clearly dominating. “There is a strong appetite—60 percent of our customers using our product run in a virtual environment. We are seeing that percentage really grow over time. We are also seeing a growth in the SME space, there is a growing number adopting virtualization software, and therefore our product is growing with it.”

[ header = Beyond TCO ]

Beyond TCO

There are other reasons to like virtual beyond cost-savings. Unison has anti-spam, anti-virus, and other security features built in along with back up. “The goal is to have an IT person deploy just one single server and that is it for all communications,” says Bradbury. “Where as Microsoft makes you deploy seven or eight different servers and pay them a huge amount of money as well. Ours is really quite easy because it is just one server, as opposed to lots of data stores and different servers.” While this is a plus, it does force archiving to be well defined. “With Unison you really have to decide what your archive policy is, because it does email, it does IM, and phone calls. You could record every single conversation that goes through the organization, so there is a wide range of choices to be made.”

While virtual environments are in many ways not different than physical ones, it does make some things easier. “Backup/restore and disaster recovery are a little easier, because there are great tools built into VMware to do that,” says Crosley. “Also, you can do fancy things like move a running image from one cluster to another.”

Rao also notes that manageability is another driver for going virtual. “Besides the cost savings from going from physical to virtual, you have the ability to take snap shots and clone systems and move things around. You can put a test system into production, back up a live production, etc. All these types of things become possible with virtualization that are really a lot harder to do with physical appliances.”

At Spam Titan, Kavanagh finds that initially it is cost driven, which, he describes as “hooking into the whole server consolidation math equation.” He also adds, “But what we have found over time, is that people are becoming more aware of the instant scalability, or instant redundancy that can be built in, or the backup that can be built in. People are figuring out quickly that the advantages over stand-alone physical appliances are tremendous. For example, if a physical appliance breaks, it requires a physical interaction. With a virtual one, if it breaks, another appliance is immediately deployed in its place with the exact same configuration, at no extra cost and no inconvenience.”

Adopters of virtualization have also found what Proofpoint found, while using the product for its own QA. “In the same way that it makes the product easy for us to QA internally, it is a great way for potential customers to get the experience of the product without having to commit to a hardware appliance evaluation agreement,” says Crosley. “It makes a great evaluation environment. It turns an enterprise software product into a shareware model, where you can download a product, get a key for it, and have access to the whole product. We do not have to ship it, nor do they have to install anything into their racks.”

In fact, early adopters are now expanding virtualization uses. “We are seeing a dramatic increase towards a more sophisticated virtual environment,” says Kavanagh. “For example, for the VMware environment, the use of VMware ESX and ESXi product suites. These are the ones that let you build back up and redundancy solutions and put them in place. We see an increase in customers that are using those, rather than the stand-alone server versions. What we gleam from that is that customers are really benefiting from the advantages of virtualization.”

Kavanagh also notes an interesting shift in the attitude of customers from those who use physical appliances and those who use virtual. “The customer has greater ownership and control over the hardware solution themselves. If they have issues with the virtual environment, it is easier for the customers to take control and solve the problem themselves. We find that customers prefer this and it suits them. No matter how good the customer support is, if the customer can solve the problem themselves, they are happy to take greater control of the solution.”

SaaS, Virtualization and the Hybrid Solution

As mentioned in Pinching Pennies with SaaS (December 2008), hosted offerings are the other technology on a fast-growth track. As Proofpoint started with software, and moved to physical appliances and now has both SaaS and virtual products, one wonders if the company has experienced a customer shift towards its latest offerings. “The business is definitely shifting in those two directions,” confirms Crosley. “The SaaS offerings—Proofpoint on Demand both enterprise and standard edition—are our fastest growing deployment model. I expect Proofpoint on Demand to become the flagship product, where as people would have considered the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway appliance to be the flagship previously. So definitely the increase in SaaS has been huge.” In fact, Proofpoint is seeing a variety of combinations of its offerings being used by a single organization. “I believe the hybrid will be more popular and is the wave of the future,” predicts Crosley. “You are going to see more trending toward things that are deployed as hardware, as virtual, and as SaaS in a mixed environment, depending on how it makes sense for the customer. For a while, hybrid meant mixing virtual and hardware appliances, but now hybrid also includes mixing SaaS and on-premise, and virtual is part of the on-premise world. So now if someone wants a hybrid deployment, you really have to ask more questions.”