WhatsUp Gold and IMail Server

WhatsUpGold and IMail Server: Key Ingredients to Acme Internet’s Success as an ISP

Company: Acme Internet
Industry: Telecommunications
Business challenge: Keeping customers satisfied through uninterrupted service delivery; eliminating spam
Outcome: Ipswitch WhatsUpGold and IMail Server help keep Acme running and problem free—24x7x365

Minneapolis-based Acme Internet is a Microsoft Certified Partner that specializes in providing professional, high quality, yet affordable web site hosting, development and related services to customers based on a Microsoft platform. In its 10+ years of operation, Acme has evolved from a computer bulletin board service with a few hundred users to a full-service organization supporting over 2,000 virtual domains and 18,000 users.

Acme meets Ipswitch

Acme implemented Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold in 1998 after it was highly recommended by another ISP. A short trial of this powerful but easy-to-use network management system quickly demonstrated a multitude of benefits, and Acme was convinced: This was a product they had to have. Instead of waiting for customers to call and report that a web site was down or there was a problem with email, Acme would now be able to fix things before they went wrong—and before customers were ever aware there was a problem.

Acme’s Network Operations group has used WhatsUp Gold ever since to monitor approximately 90 devices and services on those devices—including web servers, mail servers, voice over IP phone systems, routers, and the Internet connectivity. Several of Acme’s server-dedicated customers also log in and use the system to monitor their own devices. The monitoring infrastructure has been programmed with different levels of alerts according to the time of day and who needs to respond. For example, during business hours, a popup on a workstation monitor alerts on-the-job technicians that a server is not responding. After hours, the same problem triggers e-mails and pages to on-call personnel.

The result, according to Julie Silverman, Director of Network Operations, is that “WhatsUpGold allows us to mitigate problems in a very short response time, which makes our customers extremely satisfied. In most cases, customers don’t even notice when there’s a problem—they just know that we’re monitoring the system and that we’re very responsive to outages or services that aren’t working.”

“What WhatsUpGold does best is let us know if something isn’t working. Unfortunately for me, I did get a page on the 4th of July. However, I’d rather come in to fix a small problem on a holiday — before it becomes a BIG problem the next business day. Luckily, it turned out that a quick reboot was all that was needed.”

WhatsUp Gold also provides critical input into Acme’s business decisions. For example, when the company was experiencing issues with big spikes in bandwidth, Acme customized WhatsUp Gold to track usage via SNMP so it could identify when the spikes were happening and why. “The product is flexible enough that when network bandwidth went over a certain threshold, the system fired off an email message and even sent a cc: to my pager,” explained Silverman. “This information helped us decide when we needed to bring in another Internet circuit to meet our growing bandwidth needs.”

Acme also relies on statistics provided by WhatsUpGold to identify problems with hardware. “If a server has paged me X times in the last month, maybe we need to replace the machine,” said Silverman. “We use the statistics to identify problem servers and pull those machines out of service.”

All technical support staff have access to WhatsUpGold. “It’s one of the first logins they get,” noted Silverman, adding that the system is so easy to use that even the most non-technical personnel are able to log on and perform basic functions such as adding new machines to the network and reviewing system status. In fact, WhatsUpGold network maps have been posted to the company intranet, enabling all employees to obtain a quick status of system operations without a separate login to the WhatsUpGold server.

WhatsUp Gold’s hardware requirements are minimal. Even as Acme’s business has grown, WhatsUp Gold continues to support its growing network without additional hardware.

IMail Server follows suit

Around the same time that Acme started using WhatsUpGold to monitor network performance, the company developed a significant problem with spam, and the e-mail application they were using had no built-in security. The company looked at IMail Server—Ipswitch’s full-featured e-mail solution designed specifically for small- and medium-sized companies—based on a recommendation from the same source who recommended WhatsUpGold. After spending a holiday weekend blocking IP addresses in a frantic attempt to stem their spam problem, the company decided to immediately proceed with licensing and installing IMail Server.

“We researched and tested a number of solutions, and liked IMail Server the best,” Silverman recalled. “IMail Server seemed to have the most other ISPs using it…the most third-party support…and we could buy add-ons.”

Acme uses IMail Server for their own in-house e-mail needs, their customers’, and for handling some of the e-mail notifications from WhatsUpGold. IMail Server’s antispam features, combined with the added features from the third-party Declude antispam tool—rapidly dropped the daily mail volume from 100,000 to about 30,000 messages, with an indiscernible percentage of false positives. Acme plans to install some additional e-mail servers to split up some of the mail load.

Customer support delivers

The need for customer support has been minimal, but highly satisfactory when required. Silverman recalled spending a significant amount of time trying to resolve a particular issue on her own, and then finally resolving the problem after spending just minutes on the phone with a support rep. “He confirmed that the problem was a known issue, worked me through it in about five minutes, and made sure that I kept my mail service up while identifying a fix,” Silverman said. “A patch was released just a few weeks later.”

IMail Server didn’t disappoint during the last big upgrade the company performed, which involved migrating from an older tower-based system running NT4 Server to a rack-based server running Windows Server 2003. “I was really nervous,” said Silverman. “This involved thousands of domains and users and a major O/S upgrade. We staged a new server at 7 p.m. on a Friday, and then did the cutover. The system was down for less than 15 minutes so that we could drag and drop all mail directories and the registry from one machine to the other. We were back up and fully functioning—and I couldn’t believe the performance difference.