Azaleos offers Exchange-in-a-box

Azaleos offers an interesting hybrid solution for organizations that want to run Microsoft Exchange. The company offers OneServer, a clustered appliance that provides a complete Exchange solution consisting of Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003 and the Sybari Antigen anti-virus/anti-spam solution, as well as other capabilities. The appliance is based on Intel Xeon processors and each appliance can support up to 2,500 users.

The twist, however, is that Azaleos also offers OneStop, a set of managed services that are designed to completely manage the appliance that resides behind its customers’ firewalls. Using these services, Azaleos manages its customers’ appliances, tracking problems with the hardware and software, providing patch management services, notifying customers about problems and other providing other capabilities.

The list price for the Azaleos appliance is $30,000, meaning that the acquisition cost can be as low as $12 per seat for a complete Exchange solution. Azaleos also offers its appliances on a monthly, per seat basis. The Azaleos appliance supports IP-based storage and can use an IP-based storage-area network. It also integrates into an existing Active Directory deployment and can support an internally managed archiving system.

One of the key objections raised by some e-mail managers to the use of managed messaging services is that a hosted solution is inherently less secure than an in-house one because the corporate message store – a critically important asset for most companies – is housed in a remote data center and not behind the corporate firewall. The Azaleos solution circumvents this objection very nicely by placing all of the hardware, software and storage behind the corporate firewall, while providing the advantages of a hosted solution’s management model. The result is an inexpensive Exchange solution that can significantly reduce the cost of conventional, internally managed solutions.