Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Stalker Adds Virus Scanning to OS/400 E-mail Server

Stalker Software last week announced new antivirus software for the OS/400 version of its e-mail and messaging server. The antivirus software, which Stalker helped develop and co-licenses from Network Associates' McAfee division, will be delivered as a native OS/400 virus scanning engine that plugs directly into CommuniGatePro. The enhancement, which was driven by a customer request, signifies the growing demand for a native OS/400 enterprise-strength e-mail server, besides Domino, the company says.

Stalker Software supports 35 different platforms with its CommuniGate Pro software, and has been offering the McAfee antivirus scanning engine as an optional plug-in on many of those platforms for the last year and a half. The company also sells antivirus and antispam plug-ins from Sophos on other platforms. However, when it came to OS/400, which Stalker has supported with CommuniGate Pro since 2000, customers were left on their own to defend themselves against the numerous viruses, worms, and other infestations riding e-mail on the Information Superhighway.

With about 100 organizations now running CommuniGate Pro on OS/400 servers, the lack of antivirus software on the platform was beginning to look like a missing piece of the puzzle, company officials say. Stalker has doubled its OS/400 installed base in the last 14 months, with customers such as Colorado State University's bookstore, the Ignite/400 mailing list, and others, deploying the software on AS/400 and iSeries servers. When it came to delivering enterprise-strength e-mail and messaging functionality on this extremely reliable and very secure machine, it just didn't make sense not to offer antivirus capabilities. So Stalker contacted McAfee, which, as luck would have it, had done some OS/400 antivirus development of its own in the last year.

Long considered immune from common viruses and worms parading over the Internet, the iSeries--specifically, its Integrated File System--is a perfect host for Windows viruses. While OS/400 is inherently immune from Windows infections because of the way it only allows programs compiled on its own machine to run on that machine, there is nothing in OS/400 to stop viruses from being stored in the IFS and distributed to PC clients, which are susceptible to those viruses. Until recently, nobody had developed a tool to tell you if your IFS was infected with viruses.

This summer, OS/400 systems management software vendor Bytware announced the world's first antivirus scanning engine for OS/400, StandGuardAV, which it co-developed with McAfee (see "Bytware Launches OS/400 Antivirus Software to Treat IFS Infections". This fall, Bytware expanded the antivirus capabilities in StandGuardAV to allow it to scan e-mails sent with OS/400's native SMTP e-mail server.

Stalker put a request in with McAfee for an OS/400 version of the McAfee Antivirus Engine, and McAfee delivered. Some configuration had to be done by Stalker to get the engine to support Stalker's CommuniGate Pro e-mail server the way it wanted. In the end, the functionality Stalker is delivering with McAfee Antivirus Plugin is pretty much the same for OS/400 as it delivers for Windows, Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, and other platforms.

Stalker's Antivirus Plugin checks incoming and outgoing e-mails against McAfee's virus database. The software gives administrators control over certain aspects of the process, such as how big files must be to trigger a search, and what to do with a virus. All configuration is done from a Web-based administration page (served by CommuniGate Pro's built-in HTTP servers). Stalker did a lot of the development for the McAfee Antivirus Plugin, and supports the product itself, but users connect to the McAfee Web site for updates to the virus definitions.

Many of the organizations using Stalker's e-mail server are using e-mail clients running on Windows, the most targeted platform for virus writers. One of the growing uses of CommuniGate Pro server is replacing Microsoft's Exchange e-mail and messaging server. Because Stalker supports the same messaging application program interface (MAPI) connector that Exchange uses to communicate with Microsoft's e-mail client, Outlook, CommuniGate Pro can replace Exchange, without Outlook users knowing. Officials say this trend is starting to take hold in OS/400 shops, too.

Officials with Stalker say the new Antivirus Plugin for OS/400 will be available by the end of the week. The product requires CommuniGate Pro version 3.59 or higher (it's currently at version 4.14) and OS/400 V5R1. Pricing for all versions of the company's McAfee Antivirus Plugin are based on the number of e-mails scanned per hour. For light traffic (50 or fewer messages per hour) the product costs $399 per year. For customers who want to scan up to 1,000 messages per hour, the product costs $1,599 per year. An unlimited license is available for $15,000 per year. CommuniGate Pro comes in two versions: the single-server version, which supports multi-processor machines, and the clustered version, which offers high availability and load balancing across clustered servers for a premium. The single-server version starts at $499, which supports 50 e-mail users, and scales up to $59,999 for an unlimited number of users.

Stalker, which is based in Mill Valley, California, offers free trials of its software. To download a trial, or to get more information, visit the company online at www.stalker.com.