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Meridius Security Gateway Appliance 3.0, starts at $9,995 ($17,995 as tested). Available: early November. BlueCat Networks, (866) 895-6931, (905) 882-5691. bluecatnetworks.com/meridius |
On the admin side, 3.0 improves attachment filtering, adds more detailed backup and maintenance options, and lets you cap the number of user whitelist entries. Other bells and whistles include DNS MX lookups, a raft of Web-based reporting options, automatic pulldown of software updates, granular transport settings for domains and subdomains, and IMAP/POP proxies. Although the canned reports are comprehensive, I'd like to see more customization options to help admins ferret out tricky queries--for example, an option to see virus-infected origin domains cross-referenced with the time of delivery.
Version 3.0 also promises user-definable whitelists. These give users the power to control their acceptable sender lists, greatly reducing gripe calls to your e-mail administrator. Users at my school weren't pleased that the old Meridius didn't allow this user customization. Unfortunately, the functionality wasn't ready for testing.
The price tag on the Meridius is a rather steep $15,000 per appliance, including RPD and all other options. This price supports unlimited users and processing up to 250,000 messages per day. Annual maintenance costs $1,800 to $2,800, depending on the hours of coverage for the service contract chosen. Sites under service contract receive all definition files and version upgrades. Using the two-year cost criteria from Network Computing's May 13 comparison of antispam products, Meridius would cost $17.80 per user at a 1,000-client site, placing BlueCat in the middle of the pack on pricing for a midsize organization. This may be out of reach for some shops, but the full feature set of 3.0 makes the BlueCat offering an excellent turnkey solution.
Joe Hernick, PMP, MS, is director of IT at the Loomis Chaffee School. Write to him at [email protected].
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