One.com uses Halon to reduce operating costs
Problem
One.com was looking to upgrade their existing email delivery and security infrastructure to a newer solution that scaled better in terms of performance and maintenance. However, the new solution needed to be flexible and open to integrate seamlessly into One.com’s highly customizable and optimized hosting platform.
One.com’s Director of Engineering Søren Visti Kristensen says:
‘Our goal was to also reduce our expenses and offer more services with the new platform, while providing on-demand scalability in a highly-secure environment without costly upgrades.’
Solution
Søren says ‘We researched and evaluated many email security and delivery platforms against our requirements. We finally settled on the Halon email platform based on price performance, ease of use, flexibility, multitenancy support with security and its ability to scale on demand.’
Halon’s highly integrated and comprehensive platform now comprises One.com’s entire email delivery infrastructure; except for email storage and webmail.
On the inbound side, clusters of Halon nodes have replaced several layers of One.com’s email gateways. The clusters perform:
- IP reputation
- recipient verification
- anti-spam and antivirus
- content filtering
- both aliases and external forwards with SRS
- auto-replies
- backup/replay
- routing to the email storage servers over LMTP
All according to a REST API that One.com wrote. The outbound cluster integrates with the same API for SASL authorization, relay permissions and rate metrics, and ensures excellent deliverability.
The logic is scripted in a way that fits their traffic sources, using techniques such as source hashing, dedicated “bulk” IPs for suspicious traffic, adaptive rate limits, queue metrics and delivery failure rates and concurrency control, all working together using scripted feedback loops.
Halon’s optimized and scriptable software also enabled One.com to start DKIM signing all outbound messages per domain (using selector/key pairs provided by the REST API) with very little CPU overhead.
We researched and evaluated many email security and delivery platforms against our requirements. We finally settled on Halon email platform based on price performance, ease of use, flexibility, multitenancy support with security and its ability to scale on demand.
Søren Visti Kristensen, One.com
Results
Reduced capital and operating expenses
By using the Halon email platform we were able to consolidate and upgrade several disparate email gateways into one cost-effective, feature-rich and easy-to-manage cluster of Halon nodes. This enabled us to reduce initial capital costs, ongoing support and maintenance costs, rack space, and ongoing power and cooling requirements by up to 70%.
Scales on demand securely
Halon helped securely scale each customer on its multitenant-enabled email platform and offer new services on demand and independent of each customer.
Integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure
Halon’s platform flexible and scriptable email engine helped to integrate it seamlessly and quickly with our highly customized and optimized in house platform.
