AWS Case Study: Ipswitch

“There is a strong need for email archiving driven by the growing dependency on email and the many legal regulations requiring companies to protect it,” Senter explained. Email data now requires rapid retrieval and longer retention periods, raising practical concerns over escalating storage needs and increasing capacity needs on email servers—as well as questions about secure storage.

Sonian Hosted Archival Systems is the email archiving solution Ipswitch chose to offer customers seeking a hosted provider. Sonian, an innovator in archiving technology, used Amazon Web Services to create a leading-edge hosted archive service built using modern “Web 2.0” technology and design methodologies. Sonian’s solution is built entirely on the Amazon Web Services cloud—Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS) and SimpleDB. The Sonian system was designed to be an easily scalable, cloud-aware application: Amazon EC2 instances pull email data from a customer mail server and then compress and encrypt the data, storing it on Amazon S3; the Amazon SQS runs internal job control and queuing; and Amazon SimpleDB stores document metadata. Sonian built its own automation, deployment and self-healing aspects, and customers access archived data through a secure web portal hosted on Amazon EC2.

Ipswitch began investigating email archiving several years ago, based on market trends and customer demands. They looked at three options for an archiving solution: build it in-house, buy a company that makes it, or use a third-party option. Analyzing the market and competition convinced the company that the best choice was to identify an OEM that fit with its corporate mission and business model.

Ipswitch and Sonian worked closely together to develop a seamless system and build APIs that allow the two technologies to connect reliably. “The first step in the archiving process is collecting data securely from IMail customers,” commented Jeff Richards, VP Sales and Business Development for Sonian Inc. “We made sure that the collection process works perfectly. And as Ipswitch adds customers, Sonian technology easily handles the increase using the Amazon Web Services cloud.”

A robust cross section of Ipswitch customers is looking at its new archiving solutions. “We’ve seen an immediate response from the finance, government and education markets,” Senter said. “Many customers want to move from their current solution to the IMail archiving solution and are asking how to transfer their data. With the reliability of Sonian and Amazon Web Services, we can be absolutely certain that customers can transfer their data with complete security.” Ipswitch predicts ten percent of its customer base will purchase email archiving by the third quarter of 2009, with sales continuing to increase after that.

“Ipswitch believes that cloud computing solutions will begin to fill critical needs in most markets,” Senter said. “We are actively researching other technologies to take advantage of the cloud, and anticipate bringing major innovative technologies to the market in the near future.”

http://www.imailserver.com/