I talked with Proofpoint today, and got a more positive view about VMware’s virtual appliance strategy
than I’ve gotten from other appliance vendors. They cite over 500
downloads in the past couple of months, of which a significant fraction
have turned into actual sales. Specific deployment scenarios they
mentioned include:
- Demo (of course).
- Tweak, test, deploy – between
patches and new anti-spam rulesets, Proofpoint users seem to have a
rapid change/test/deploy cycle. Virtualization makes it possible to do
that without having multiple copies of an appliance.- Disaster recovery — this seems to be a big one.
- “Surges” – depending on what the
bad guys are doing, one’s need for anti-spam servers can go up and down
in a hurry. Virtualization makes it easy to respond.
virtual appliances
Proofpoint and VMware – an apparently non-trivial virtual appliance success story
