[Info-vax] New Product Announcement: SOPHAST - High performance interface for Sophos Anti-Virus on OpenVMS

[Jeremy Begg]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the release of "SOPHAST" - a high performance 
interface to Sophos Anti-Virus (SAV) on OpenVMS.

SAV has been used for many years on OpenVMS servers to scan files on behalf 
of Windows clients before making those files available to the clients.  For 
example, SAV can be used with Process Software's PMDF product for scanning 
all email which passes through the server.

Unfortunately, SAV on OpenVMS suffers from two serious drawbacks:

1.  It's very slow, because each activation of the VSWEEP command line
     utility entails reading into memory all of the virus definition files
     (several hundred of them).

2.  Integrating SAV into your own application requires you to deal with the
     somewhat baroque SAV API.

Our new product directly targets both those issues.

In our testing we have found SOPHAST can process 150-200 times as many files 
as VSWEEP in a given time interval (or, to put it another way, SOPHAST is up 
to 200 times faster than VSWEEP).

Also, we believe our API is somewhat simpler to use from within your own 
application.

The initial release provides the SOPHAST server and command line client.  We 
are cleaning up the API documentation and will release it as soon as possible.

Future work will include a native PMDF channel for virus scanning (more 
efficient and more flexible than the CONVERSION channel) and we are 
investigating the integration of SOPHAST into web proxy servers such as a 
suitably-configured WASD webserver.

SOPHAST is licenced and priced on a per-node basis.  For more information 
and to request an evaluation copy, please visit the SOPHAST web site
  http://www.vsm.com.au/sophast/

I will be attending the OpenVMS Bootcamp in September where I will be happy 
to demonstrate SOPHAST to anyone who may be interested.  I will also be 
presenting a paper describing one of the techniques used by SOPHAST to make 
it as efficient as possible.

Regards,

         Jeremy Begg

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