Hands on preview: Accellion Virtual Appliance

It’s no mystery that e-mail systems can’t handle easily numerous large attachments. Companies that need to transfer large files know all too well that crowding with large attachments an e-mail server is a poor solution that impairs the latter without improving much the delivery of the former, much like trying to pull a heavy trailer with a sport car.

Alternative methods to transmit large files, FTP for example, are not as user friendly and have the additional disadvantage of requiring a different transmission path, separated from person-to-person messaging.

Accellion has been shipping for quite some time its Secure File Transfer Appliance (SFTA), an effective solution that combines the ease of use of e-mail attachments with efficient data transfers and robust monitoring and security features.

In addition to the applications installed on the appliance the Accellion solution includes an agent, unimaginatively named Attachments, that installed on users machines creates a seamless link between their e-mail client and the Web server present on the SFTA box.

At send time Attachments will automatically upload all attached files to the appliance, replacing each attachment with a link to its location. Along with those links, the recipient will find instructions on how to download the attachments, nice and easy.

Last week Accellion made available a virtual version of the appliance, the full name is Secure File Transfer Virtual Appliance (SFTVA), that installs as a virtual machine under VMware ESX or VMware Server.

The virtual appliance delivers the same functionality of the hardware based solution but has a sensibly lower entry price.

On the road to conversion

The actual delivery method of the virtual appliance to customers could be different but I received my evaluation copy as files attached to an e-mail message.

If Accellion wanted to impress me, they did. At about 360MB for the appliance image plus 4-5MB of documentation those attachments would never have been accepted by my corporate Exchange server. On the contrary, that message was delivered to my inbox without hiccups because as shown below, it contained only secure links to those large files.

In fact, that message had added only a few KB to my e-mail server, leaving to me the choice of when physically move the files to my machine. It’s also worth noting that as a recipient I only needed a browser and access to the Internet to retrieve my attachments.

Downloading, unzipping and converting my appliance image using VMware Converter were uneventful steps but took some time because of the rather large capacity of my evaluation machine that expanded to occupy 200 GB on my ESX server.

Accellion supports appliances with larger capacity but those will cost you more as the price increases according to the amount of disk space and the amount of memory allocated.

After completing the installation steps above I just powered on my new VM from the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client. From that point on, no VMware skill is needed to manage and use the appliance.

In fact, to access the management GUI I just pointed my browser to the virtual appliance IP address and logged using an account with administrative rights. Look out for that agent

The Accellion appliance has an extensive set of management options to fine tune the behavior of its applications and to monitor users and resources.

For example from the admin GUI you can authorize users to download and install Lotus Notes and Outlook plug-ins on their machines, or prevent others from using the appliance for their attachments.

Authorizing a user to download an agent automatically creates a notification message that contains the agent install file and set up instructions.

I did not have Lotus Notes on my test bed, but judging from my experience with Outlook, installing and using the agent shouldn’t be a problem for most users.

After the install I had to restart my desktop, but although the agent creates a dedicated button to upload attachments to the virtual appliance, the familiar paper clip was still available on the Outlook GUI so that users won’t have to change their habits.

An interesting management feature sets a threshold on the size of the files that are automatically uploaded to the appliance, which gives admins a powerful tool to route small files via the e-mail server reserving the appliance only for attachments larger than the threshold. The Accellion agent handles those transfers with aplomb. For example in the above message to a Gmail test account the small spreadsheet file was embedded as a regular attachment while the 40 MB movie clip was sent as a link.

Keeping track of who did or saw what is becoming increasingly important as more regulatory bodies assimilate digital files to paper documents.

Appropriately, the Accellion appliance maintains a log of all file transfers and can produce several built in reports that should facilitate the work of your auditors and your attorneys when some investigation is needed.

Accellion Secure File Transfer Virtual Appliance Availability Shipping Price Starts at $2,000 per year for a VM with 63GB of storage and 1GB RAM Verdict

It may not come cheap but the Accellion Virtual Appliance solves the thorny problem of large e-mail attachments with responsive and efficient agents and well thought management tools.

Perhaps the most convincing image of what the solution can do is seeing the Outlook agent upload 1.6 GB worth of attachments to the virtual appliance.

If you already can do (or couldn’t care less about doing) a similar feat from your e-mail client, the Accellion Virtual Appliance is not for you. Otherwise, you should give some thoughts to reserving a virtual machine and some disk space on your VMware servers for this intriguing virtual appliance.