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Do you need an Internet communications server solution that handles email, instant messaging, calendaring, and VoIP?

CommuniGate Pro 5.0 could be the ticket.

It competes directly with other carrier-level collaboration packages like Critical Path, Openwave, and Sun/iPlanet.

Thom O'Connor, Director of Product Architecture, pointed out that the unique scalability of CommuniGate Pro comes from the "Dynamic Cluster." The same binary runs on all cluster machines as a multi node system. All services are active on all machines in the cluster, and all systems provide service for all users.

This helps the product reliably accommodate large numbers of users. For example Tele2, the European telco, has about 30 million telephony users and 5 million on email. The email system is a CommuniGate Pro 4.3 Dynamic Cluster with 16 front-end servers and 5 back-end servers. Users were migrated from a previous Openwave system. Servers are both Linux and Solaris powered (within the same cluster). The back-end communicates over NFS to a medium-sized NAS array of between 100 and 200 disks. Shared storage for Dynamic Clusters can be on NAS or SAN.

The largest cluster to date has been a 24 (frontend) by 16 (backend) server cluster. That system was constructed 5 years ago and would require far fewer servers, for the same four-million account cluster.

At the other end of the spectrum are smaller clusters and even single-server systems. Examples include Childrens Hospital of Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) and the University of Virginia. Universities are prime candidates for all-in-one collaboration systems because of the need for ease of provisioning and frequent user changes.

Currently, there are about 9,000 customer sites and 180 strong resellers and integrator. The majority are Telco and Broadband service providers. Many of the VoIP technology partners OEM CommuniGate Pro and bundle it into their integrated solution offerings.

Next: Open Standards For Collaboration »