CommuniGate Pro at Ish NRW GmbH - Offering Channels of Internet Communications

CASE STUDY /06 03 INDUSTRY Ish NRW GmbH is the largest cable net operator in the North Rhine Westphalia region of Germany. Ish Cable provides radio and television to over four million homes in the North-Rhine area. With the introduction of, “Tividi,” the digital TV offering of Ish, all NRW households served by Ish have access to 75 additional digital programs. Of those, 1.46 million homes within the area of the modernized cable network also have access to high-speed internet and telephony 1. Ish also has one of the most reliable networks in Germany. If there ever is a technical issue, Ish has over 250 employees in its cli- ent service center and over 400 technicians providing a 99.9% error free network. CommuniGate Pro at Ish NRW GmbH— Offering Channels of Internet Communications CHALLENGE Ish faces numerous challenges in their daily operations. They have ten thousands of customers who rely on them for their communications purposes. They don’t want to spend hours upon hours trying to man- age their email system. When Ish set up their business in 2001, they could have chosen one of many email solutions, but after an extensive search, Ish found CommuniGate Pro to be the most reliable and cost-efficient solution and relies on their systems since that time. SOLUTION CommuniGate Systems Dynamic Cluster with its five-nine uptime provided exactly the type of email solution Ish was looking for. They have had little to no trouble setting up and running their version of CommuniGate Pro. If they ever do have a question, the helpdesk has always been here to support them. “CGS support via the phone and mailing forum is fast, helpful and to the point.” Not only does Com- muniGate provide Ish with one of the most reliable web-mail servers available, CommuniGate Systems also provides Ish with IMAP and POP capabilities, as well as McAfee Virus-Scan (one of the many third party integration options available). In addition, CommuniGate Systems provides constant updates and rolling upgrades that are easy to configure as new technological demands become apparent. 1 MegaPath Networks Inc. is a business-class broadband access and network services provider SYSTEM Ish needs powerful equipment to run their systems. Their email system configuration is no different. ARCHITECTURE that supplies high-speed access to the Internet and private networks, as well as network secu- Theyremote access, e-mail, eCommerce and Webmail system withMegaPath currently serves small, rity, run their CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster site solutions. two Front-end and two Backend servers. Their four servers are SUN 280Rs with two enterprise telecommuter markets and with 4GB mid-sized and home-based businesses, as well as 450Mhz Ultra SPARC 3 processing units distrib- uted enterprises in 150 metropolitan areas nationwide. of RAM. While CommuniGate is compatible with a variety of operating systems, Ish runs their system on Sun Solaris 8. They have two different storage systems attached to hold their electronic communica- tions. For their shared mail domains, they use an NFS mount (a NetApp F940 Filer with 1.2 Terabytes of storage space). For their customer accounts they use an LDAP database (a cluster of two Compaq Proliant DL360 machines with 3GHz processors and 2GB of RAM) which run Debian Linux and Open- LDAP in multi-master mode. BENEFITS The administration of CommuniGate pro is exceptional, with a powerful and easy to use web-interface. The Command Line Interface and Perl API allow for bulk automated provisioning, account administra- tion, and feature enhancements. SNMP polling allows ISH Cable to actively monitor the mail cluster and provide useful feedback. The clustering feature allows Ish to perform or upgrade one system at a time without loss of service. The Perl CLI capabilities allow companies such as ish cable to automate account management, gather statistics, and operate LI functionality. To Ish , the most beneficial aspect of CommuniGate Pro is the 99.999% uptime. Since they implement- ed their version of CommuniGate in 2001, Ish has had few problems when it comes to managing their email servers. Steven Carr, ISP engineer at Ish is proud to report back, “For the past five years we have been very pleased with the performance of CommuniGate Pro. It has proved itself to be a very reliable, very scalable and stable platform. Regular software updates and Dynamic Clustering provide us with the security needed for our infrastructure.” Since 2001, CommuniGate Pro has provided Ish NRW GmbH with reliable and high-performing messaging services. CASE STUDY /06 03 655 Redwood Hwy Suite 275 Mill Valley, CA 94941 T 800 262 4722 F 415 383 7461 2 www.communigate.com