Gartner Web Development, LLC

Anti-SPAM/Anti-Virus Gateway
These are the products that we?’ll focus on because they can be easily integrated into existing Small Business Server installations. Here, we need to look at the cost of the software and the labor involved in setting everything up. For a proprietary solution, I’m not going to pick on one particular product. Suffice to say that they all have similar pricing structures. We’ll figure the cost for proprietary anti-SPAM/anti-virus software at around $500.00 per year per 25 (or less) mail boxes and around $1000.00 for labor, based on 12 to 15 hours. The Open Source cost for the software is $0.00 with no limit on users and no recurring subscription fees and around $1500.00 for labor based 15 to 20 hours. The yearly maintenance on either installation, for patch installation and monitoring should only take 8 to 10 hours per year, except in the event of a major upgrade. Keeping this in mind, proprietary and open source solutions for spam and virus control do the following:

• Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk Email, or SPAM (representing 2.52% of incoming email) is removed with 95.47% accuracy.
• Viruses and other malware get removed before they ever get to the users inbox. Properly configured, this can prevent potentially dangerous security openings on your internal network by quarantining them before they ever reach your desktops and workstations. [2]

Hardware Considerations
Three years ago, we built a Microsoft Small Business Server with no spam and antivirus filtering for in house use. The machine consisted of the following:

• 1 AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.66 GHz) Processor
• 720 MB Memory
• 80 GB of storage in a software RAID 0+1
• Gigabyte motherboard
• Keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.

From spare parts, the machine cost us nearly $1000.00. Not a beast of a server, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than the recommended minimum hardware requirements. It ran great for about a year and a half. Then, the Service Packs came. At first, processes would start locking up and you would have to reboot the machine to get them all to play nice again - and then it could take literally 10 minutes to reboot.

Let me point out that services can be tuned to reduce occurrences of these types of issues. When hardware gets overworked by resource intensive services, it can start locking up. This usually means throwing a little more money at the hardware in the form of upgrades and labor for some fine tuning, and all is fine again. But, being a small business, we had no money to throw.

We only have 6 computers and 3 printers on the network at any given time so we really don’t need a domain controller. If you don’t know what a domain controller is, just keep in mind that it’s something that costs more in labor to set up and is needed in some types of networks. Conversely, a properly managed domain can reduce overall administration overhead as all computers on the domain can be centrally managed and configured. [3] We parsed our list of needed services and added a few options that previously weren’t cost effective. These are some of the things we considered important:

• SPAM and Antivirus filtering (we even get anti-phishing protection) [4]
• POP3 incoming Email Server for multiple domains
• The ability to fetch emails from other places and put them in the proper inboxes
• Web Server with multiple domains (i.e. gartnerwebdev.com, michellegartner.com, etc. served one machine)
• Secure ftp access (LAN only)
• Database server
• Secure remote access for administration
• Flexibility and scalability
• Patch availability and ease of deployment
• Low maintenance “hands off” administration
• NO HARDWARE UPGRADES

POP3 was easy. We have over 400 POP3 servers and alternatives to choose from in the Open Source world, so we are sure to find exactly what fits our needs. We’ll go with Postfix for this particular setup. FreeBSD(a Unix derived operating system) has a huge ports collection. Ports are Open Source software libraries. This collection has everything from scientific programs and statistical analysis packages, to web applications, CRM software, Content Management Systems, and more - literally thousands of high quality programs to choose from. We have a ton of system utilities too so we can monitor the systems health. I get daily, weekly, and monthly reports emailed to me by the system that allow me to monitor patches and updates, email server statistics, web site usage statistics, etc. I get just enough information to allow me to see problems before they become major, but not so much that I don’t even bother to read the reports. I can also use server traffic to gauge response to our marketing efforts through landing pages and referrer information, and even search terms used to find our web site. If we need a domain controller for all of our Windows based desktops that’s not a problem. We can even have company wide network shares on the serve that are accessible to our user desktop systems.

Putting it all Together
As I’ve said, I like the tightly integrated management functionality between Windows server products and the end-user desktop applications, such as the Office suite, and the operating system itself. I don’t want to sacrifice that functionality to save a buck. I also would like the functionality of email being checked for SPAM and viruses before it gets to our end user. How much productivity is sacrificed in the name of picking through a hundred emails to find the ones that we actually want? We use the Open Source email gateway with SPAM and Anti-virus as a front end server. We then configure our Exchange server to get its mail from the gateway. The gateway is set up not to blast any emails into oblivion. Instead, it marks them in a way that we can tell the Exchange Server to look for. If it is garbage, it goes to your “Junk Mail” folder; otherwise, it goes straight to your inbox. Having all of the internet facing services, like incoming email, web services, etc., on this front end gateway also adds an extra layer of needed protection by keeping the internal network, where all of our valuable company data is, safely behind the firewall. Proprietary and Open Source systems can compliment one another in this way while increasing overall productivity and helping, not hindering, your bottom line.