In last year's anti-virus management group test, Hauri's product impressed us with a slick interface and strong set of features. In this test, first impressions were similar. Configuration was quick and easy and the interface excellent - limited options compared to other products, but ample for most users. No reboot was required and the software demanded confirmation that the empty admin password required was in fact correct.
The product handled the tests at blazing speed, with queuing completed in 50 minutes and delivery in 90 - only slightly slower than the server's baseline performance. But that is because it only scans mail when collected by the user, so no viruses had been detected.
To check the speed of scanning, we delivered the mail to a local .pst file, which forces a scan. This took 14 hours and 20 minutes, compared to a baseline speed of just over nine hours, showing that the scan engine is a definite performance bottleneck. In a widely distributed environment, with remote mail processing the norm, this will have an impact, although it does free up resources on the mail server.
Warning messages can be sent to the server admin, the sender of an infected email and the recipient, but by default the software does not, which counts as a plus in our stress test as this only loads the server further.
The weakest point in Hauri's offering is the warning message. Disinfected messages are sent with a needlessly bulky HTML-formatted attachment that provides very little useful information and could have been a few bytes of plain text. There is no indication of how to find the infected file and the link back to Hauri's web page was broken.
Alerting is below par: the log is accurate, but Spartan with minimal search facilities and cannot easily be exported. The file on disk is in plain text, but oddly formatted, requiring some work to import into a spreadsheet. The log provides pointers to where files are kept in quarantine but, oddly, only 25 files were quarantined, well below the default limit of 1,000 files or 30Mb.
The documentation and online help is thorough, but still reads like a bad translation, not helped by a requirement to install the Korean language pack.
