A new product release comes with aggressive pricing and PR.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 7, 2008]

Burlington, Mass.-based Astaro has a deceptively simple mission, "simplify internet security."

The company is aggressively launching its Astaro Mail Gateway product with a press release that names its competition.

"In order to drive market awareness, Astaro is introducing the product at 50 percent off through the Better than Barracuda Promotion," says the press release titled New Astaro Mail Gateway Offers SMBs a Low-Cost Alternative to Weak Barracuda Product.

Barracuda has been the price leader in the appliance market for some time. Last month, when Barracuda released its link balancer, we wrote, "With its link balancer, Barracuda Networks has delivered on pricing, but not on the order of magnitude (10 times) level that we've seen before. Instead, the company focused on delivering a fully featured box that any small business can trust to manage internet connections of different kinds or from different vendors."

So has Astaro cut features in order to cut costs? Jack Daniel, Astaro Support Engineer, says not.

"We've realized that we have to be competitively priced even if we have a good product," he says.

The Astaro Mail Gateway is part of a family of products that includes the Astaro Web Gateway, the Astaro Security Gateway, and the following Management Tools: Astaro Command Center (free), Astaro Report Manager (premium), and Astaro Compliance Manager (premium).

Astaro products, says Daniel, are designed to work together. You should be able to scale, and you should be able to take the data off the box and run it on a virtual machine on your laptop for testing or troubleshooting or patching and updating.

Even the low end box has all the features, although since the boxes work together, you need one of each to get all the features that Astaro offers. "There's no premium package to get all the features turned on," says Daniel. "If you don't have the other boxes, those options are greyed out in the software."

The features
The Astaro Mail Gateway uses a standalone hardened OS that is based on SUSE Enterprise Linux (2.6 kernel). The ISO file, Daniel says, is well under 500 MB.

The company supports VMWare virtualization, but the OS should run (unsupported) on virtual machines from other vendors.

The box has the standard e-mail features you'd expect: individual mail logs, personal whitelists and quarantines, support for POP3.

It has other e-mail features too. The device has a proprietary reputation service that, Daniel says, detects spam outbreaks before anti-spam companies have a signature ready.

It complements that service with two off the self anti-spam engines, and runs two anti-virus programs, Authentium and Clam AV.

Business customers may be enthusiastic about the ability to take e-mail encryption off the desktop and offer it from the network, making it user-proof. "Well, it minimizes user error," Daniel admits. "I was a sysadmin for many years and I know that you cannot eliminate error; you can only minimize it."

So how many boxes do you need? It's a scalable solution, Daniel emphasizes. Some customers run grids of boxes and others need only one.

Pricing and availability
The Astaro Mail Gateway, part of the Astaro product suite, is available now at a 50 percent discount price of $499 through December 31, 2008.

The top of the line product costs $7,995.

Security software and tech support are extra, and are priced based on the number of boxes and the model number.

—End