E-mail management provider Azaleos Monday launched a new version of its Microsoft Exchange appliance adding monitoring, archiving and reporting features.
The 2.0 version of the company’s appliance covers both its OneServer and Blade-mail editions that run Exchange 2003 and eventually Exchange 2007 when that ships next year.
The dedicated Azaleos appliance provides an active/passive, fault tolerant and clustered Exchange platform for corporate messaging. With the Azaleos OneStop Subscription Service users get round-the-clock remote monitoring. The platform also provides maintenance and management of the appliance from the hardware to patch management for all installed software including Windows, Exchange and third-party applications.
New with 2.0 is ArchiveXchange, which is designed to supplant the need for third-party archiving tools and give administrators a way to deal with growing mailbox sizes. The module helps manage the amount of e-mail kept in the Exchange store while improving Exchange performance, reducing backup and recovery times and eliminating the need for quota management. The module removes e-mail from Exchange and indexes and stores it in folders that support search and retrieval.
“Given the nature of Exchange and e-mail in the enterprise, we have seen it become a huge repository for data,” says Lee Hudson, technology director for Zumiez, a retailer of clothing and accessories for skateboarding and snowboarding. “With Azaleos archiving we can take e-mails out of the Exchange data store and end-users get faster performance with Exchange. They don’t care where the data is stored.”
Hudson says he is sticking with Azaleos for archiving rather than a third-party vendor because he wants to keep all his e-mail management under one roof.
In version 2.0 of its appliance, Azaleos also has added a monitoring and reporting module called ViewXchange, which provides health and hygiene data. The module is designed to compete with System Center Operations Manager (formerly MOM) and allow monitoring, alerts, and execution of remote commands on OneServers. Azaleos also is using the tool for its own operations center to manage thousands of OneServers and millions of users. VieweXchange’s reporting provides formatted reports on health, traffic analysis, spam and virus activity, archiving and mobility.
“We had the capability to monitor before, but we monitored on five minute intervals and now we can monitor on a minute-by-minute [basis] and issue commands directly to the system,” says Keith McCall, CTO of Azaleos.
The other new module is SecureXchange, a remote command and control that does not require a VPN connection. Change control in the module, which uses a secure HTTP connection, is based on Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Azaleos also has added a disaster recovery option that provides redundancy across multiple sites.
The Azaleos OneServer is priced at $32,000, while Blade-mail, which includes the first two servers, is priced at $48,000. OneStop Managed Services include SecureXchange, ViewXchange, ArchiveXchange and Full Fidelity Disaster Recovery Services. The complete package of services costs $5 to $12 per user, per month.
