Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 > Homeland Internet Case Study

Homeland Internet - a California ISP providing network, VoIP and collaboration services

Background:

Homeland Internet has hundreds of companies and organizations running on a single Zimbra and VMware platform

The current platform includes 7 logical servers and 5 physical servers

Problem:

Homeland Internet was the target of two very large scale denial-of-service email attacks on one domain out of the hundreds they manage for customers

Solution:

Zimbra's horizontal scalability and VMware's ability to add new virtual servers on the fly allowed Homeland Internet to add additional virtual servers instantly and re-route the mail for the domain under attack to the new servers

Soon after the attack began the rest of their customers were running as if nothing was happening and the targeted customer was able to ride out the attack

Homeland Internet was then able to leverage Zimbra's administrative client to stop the denial of service attack

Benefit:

Reduced deployment costs - Zimbra can be deployed with a modular virtual architecture without having to invest in new servers for each module

Lower administrative cost - administrators can quickly change the logical architecture of the platform

Improved uptime - Homeland Internet customers see a dramatic reduction to service interruption that may be caused by DOS attacks or other unexpected changes in traffic levels