Home	Web Filter | UTM Appliance | Firewall | K12 & Schools | Web Filtering Appliance

home » solutions » Virtualized Web Filtering Why Virtualize? There are many reasons for "going virtual" - not least a reduced carbon footprint. Many organizations are looking to consolidate services onto virtual machines. This might be in attempts to reduce power bills, save server space, or improve resilience. A server running a number of virtual machines can sustain a higher utilization than if those services were running on discrete hardware. Virtual servers can reduce the amount of rack space required by increasing service density. Cooling and power bills are cut by using less servers, more efficiently - idle server hardware does not "powersave" like the equivalent desktop. Disaster recovery can be simpler, virtually - an entire machine, operating systems, settings and all, represented as a single folder, and fast, highly redundant RAID can be shared by many services. Scalability improves - servers can be moved to more powerful hardware with no downtime. Why SmoothWall? Web filtering and virtualization are a natural fit. Smaller organisations may not wish to devote an entire server to the task, yet it is not always optimal to shoe-horn your filter onto a general purpose platform. As a critical element of your Internet connectivity, it's also important that your filter is reliable and recoverable. Perhaps your existing filtering appliance is starting to show its age, and performance isn't what it should be, or your ISA server simply can't carry off all those myriad tasks any longer. Maybe it is time to shed some extra weight, and virtualize. SmoothWall's "Software Appliance" is tried and tested on a VMware platform. This includes free editions, such as "VMware Player" right up to the higher level Infrastructure or ESX products. Network Guardian includes the VMware tools, enabling full communication between the host and the guest. For more information, please contact us.