modus™ Deployment

Scenarios for Deploying modus™ technology

modus™ offers versatility and flexibility in its deployment to meet the requirements of your specific environment. Illustrated are two of the most common scenarios used to provide maximum security and redundancy for different sized corporations.

• Blockade is targeted at larger corporations with standalone SQL database servers and remote sites
• Hot-Standby can be used in smaller businesses with no dedicated SQL database servers and either local or remote redundant modus™ servers.

Vircom’s expert Service Team is available to help you plan your organization’s specific deployment to ensure that your security, scaling and topology requirements are met.  Please check our Professional Services section for more information.

Blockade

The Blockade scenario is ideal for larger corporations, either with or without remote sites.  Its deployment involves two (or more) modus™ servers that run in parallel, ensuring full and reliable redundancy in case of failure.  The Blockade scenarios feature either:

• Two or more modusMail™ servers with a load balancer installed upstream, which splits the incoming SMTP, POP, IMAP and HTTP traffic equally between the two nodes.
• Two or more modusGate™ gateways with either an optional load balancer or a Round Robin DNS configured to split the SMTP Traffic.

The Blockade also requires a central MS-SQL database in the backend and a file server (or SAN) to store shared mailbox messages (for modusMail™) and shared quarantine messages (for modusMail™ and modusGate™).  Depending on the scale of the setup, the MS-SQL server and the file server may be installed on the same physical machine, or be part of a distributed network of machines.

Hot-Standby

The Hot-Standby scenario is a redundancy scheme with a primary active node and a secondary “ready to go” backup node that does not actively receive any traffic unless the primary node goes down.

Created by Vircom to support smaller companies, the Hot Standby is a popular scenario that provides redundant modusGate servers or appliances without the added expense of dedicated SQL and file servers.

In the Hot-Stand-by scenario, the primary (Master) node takes the entire load of traffic all the time. The secondary node (hot-standby or Backup) is live, but the SMTPRS service is stopped. The Backup node monitors the Master node to see whether it is up or down. In case the Master node fails, the Backup node’s SMTPRS starts automatically and receives the full SMTP traffic.

Additional Scenarios

Vircom’s expert Service Team is also available to help with your organization’s specific needs.  Please check our Professional Services for more information.