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We weren't expecting much from Stalker Software when we invited the company to participate. Stalker is a small company, with 15 to 20 full-time employees. That fact may scare away some hardened IT veterans, but we think its CommuniGate Pro is worth a very close look based on our experience. A European company, Stalker Software was founded in 1991 as an Apple Computer Macintosh software developer. Stalker opened its U.S. office in 1993 and first released CommuniGate Pro in September 1998.

When we received Stalker's seemingly lowball bid for MediaMakers' system RFP, we thought the company must have been kidding. However, as we began to get results back from the benchmark while reviewing CommuniGate Pro's features with Vladimir Butenko, Stalker's president, we started to see the light.

Like all the products covered in this RFP, CommuniGate Pro has the required buzzwords and acronyms covered: IMAP4, POP3, APOP (Authentication POP), Web, SMTP, ESMTP (Enhanced SMTP), delegated administration, multidomain support, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), SASL (Simple Authentication Security Layer), list support, antispam, RBL (real-time black list), SNMP management, cluster support and the list goes on.

But Stalker's CommuniGate Pro also includes features that aren't on most required lists, such as ACAP (Application Configuration Access Protocol) support and simultaneous support for both mbox and mdir mailbox formats.

CommuniGate Pro really got our attention as the only product in this RFP that didn't generate a single error on the client side during testing. All the other products timed out IMAP and/or SMTP requests from clients when those products were under high load. We watched the Stalker server closely during testing to see what the performance trade-offs were.

We quickly discovered CommuniGate Pro throttles back on the SMTP delivery agent under load, freeing up cycles to service IMAP and SMTP client requests. The downside of this scheme is that messages build up in the queue. After the 1,000-thread run, CommuniGate Pro's queue had more than 12,000 messages waiting for delivery. Once the client load was removed or reduced, the server happily delivered each message, emptying the queue within minutes.

We think this performance trade-off is exactly right, since the clients' requests were all serviced in a timely fashion. The maximum time any message spent in the queue waiting for delivery was 44 minutes, and this was under extremely high load, with 1,000 threads maniacally hitting the server with rapid-fire requests.

Stalker's entry was based on a small VA Linux Systems server and an IDE RAID array that used SCSI to communicate with the server. The server was attached to the test network via a 1-Gbps Ethernet adapter. The cost of hardware, with spares, was $19,000, and software--the bargain of the year--came in at $5,000 for 30,000 users (three times the number we required) with unlimited mailing lists. Add $2,000 for a five-incident, 24x7 support pack, and Stalker's bid came in at $26,000, nearly 50 percent lower than its next closest price competitor. CommuniGate Pro's performance was bettered only by Critical Path's InScribe Messaging Server, and that vendor used $116,000 in equipment to achieve its higher numbers.

For the NetMagik bid, Stalker designed a five-server, three-tier solution. A pair of load-balancers occupied the front tier; front-end mail servers, where the clients connect, occupied the middle tier; and the mail-store/back-end servers occupied the third tier. The five servers were configured as a single entity in a "dynamic" cluster, and the ISP could choose from among the 21 supported platforms. These platforms include Apple Computer MacOS Server, FreeBSD, Hewlett-Packard Co. HP-UX, IBM Corp. AIX and OS/400, Linux on a variety of chips, Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT/2000, SCO UnixWare, and Sun Microsystem Solaris on Intel or SPARC.

The platform versions can be mixed and matched front end to back end at the whim of the customer. The two-tier POP/IMAP-WebMail service offering dictated by the NetMagik RFP is easily satisfied, because CommuniGate Pro sets service access on a per-user basis.

Stalker's bid for NetMagik's 250,000-user system narrowly edged out Rockliffe's. Even though Rockliffe's bid was lower at $474,000, compared with $690,000 for Stalker's solution, we felt that the five-server architecture specified by Stalker, plus the varied platform choices available, was just enough to push CommuniGate Pro to the front.

The other factor that entered into our decision involved Rockliffe's single platform, Windows 2000. We have nothing against Windows 2000, but the ISP arena lives on a steady diet of Linux and Unix. Stalker's offering is a better fit.

Network Computing's Evaluation of Rockliffe's Proposal

Rockliffe's bids for both MediaMakers and NetMagik made our shortlists for proposals that warrant further consideration. Rockliffe's MailSite DataCenter is tied tightly to Microsoft's Windows 2000, SQL Server and Internet Information Server (IIS). In fact, MailSite doesn't run on any other platform.

Rockliffe's proposal for MediaMakers comprised a two-server cluster connected to a pair of shared Fibre Channel-attached storage arrays. Automatic failover from one cluster node to the other ensured fault-tolerance. This solution exceeded MediaMakers' three-nine uptime requirement and does so cost-effectively. The Rockliffe MailSite DataCenter's price/performance ratio was second only to that of Stalker Software's solution. The performance curve of the Rockliffe solution peaked at 400 threads but completed the benchmark without breaking a sweat.