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The challenge

When implementing a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) system many people find that appliances are either not available as virtual machine, or if so, large in file size, requiring constant patching and with read-write filesystems that might be corrupted.

The solution

All our products are offered as lightweight, flexible virtual machines. They are built as a single read-only disk image, which is entirely overwritten by a firmware during each update. Therefore, they are fast and flexible to deploy, and easy to manage.

  • VMware Ready: Although every major virtualization platform is support, the VSP is guaranteed to run exceptionally well on VMware. It has passed the demanding VMware Ready certification, and also functionally tested in the mail security category.
  • Small file size: The mail security product (VSP) is a bare FreeBSD kernel with our processes running on top of it. The security router (VSR) is a mere 7 MB download and requiring as little as 200 MB disk while running.
  • Robustness: The operating system disk image is always read-only, and the configuration partition is mounted synchronously, ensuring that it can never fail no matter how many "hard" reboots it suffers.
  • Disk image updates: No patching is required. The fact that the image is read-only, and that updates are applied as complete disk images, makes each VSP or VSR exactly identical. By simply pressing a button, the appliance downloads the latest disk image, reboots into firmware, and overwrites the system partition.
  • Firmware: Our hardware, software and virtual appliances are all based on the same system and disk images. Therefore, the virtual appliances have inherited the same persistent firmware that simplifies configuration recovery and supports the robust update procedure.
  • SOAP API: In fact, the web administration and CLI themselves are simply SOAP clients, and the SOAP API is even used internally as IPC. Anything you can dream of scripting or integrating; you can. The API is well documented and simple to use thanks to the annotated WSDL file.