Start-up Azaleos this week will debut itself and its appliance aimed at helping users create a highly-available and remotely-managed Microsoft Exchange platform.
Azaleos’ OneServer is a dedicated appliance that provides an active/passive, fault tolerant and clustered Exchange platform for corporate messaging. The appliance, which is built on either HP or Dell hardware, runs Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 and is complemented by security, mobility and compliance software from third-party vendors.
The server, which is focused on fortifying the Exchange message store, is deployed within a corporation’s network yet managed remotely by Azaleos. User management tasks, such as password changes and message store limits, are still done by corporate administrators through OneServer’s Web-based administrative console.
Azaleos’ OneStop Subscription Service is coupled in the OneServer package. It includes 24-7 monitoring along with maintenance and management of the appliance from the hardware to patch management on Windows, Exchange and third-party software within OneServer. Azaleos tests the patches using a replica of the customer’s OneServer environment before pushing them out to OneServer, which has a rollback feature to eliminate downtime.
“Exchange can be a challenging platform to keep up and running,” says Mark Levitt, an analyst at IDC. He says IDC research has shown a “hefty management load” for the older Exchange platforms, versions 5.5 and 2000. “Any way a company can get help to deal with patches and upgrades, and identify potential problems as they are developing will save them time and money. Doing that with an appliance is not typical for top-tier software, but it reflects the fact that keeping corporate e-mail systems running smoothly with minimal down time is not an easy thing,” Levitt says.
While the OneServer is a unique approach to solving that issue, Azaleos faces competition from third-party Exchange management software vendors such as Quest, NetIQ and other start-ups, including Lucid8 Information Systems.
But Azaleos’ angle is one that should be familiar to large organizations, according to its founders.
“Think about this in the context of how today people deploy storage devices, boxes that sit in network and push out monitoring information,” says Keith McCall, co-founder and CTO of Azaleos. “We are doing the same thing for enterprise messaging. You can think about this, in the consumer space, as the TiVo of enterprise messaging.”
The OneServer, which supports up to 2,500 users on one appliance, wraps Exchange and Active Directory interfaces into a set of .Net Web services that Azaleos uses to remotely access the OneServer. The appliance also features third-party software, including Sybari Antigen for Exchange 8.0 to provide anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities, Enterprise Vault from KVS for archiving and compliance and GoodLink Server technology by Good Technology to support mobile users.
OneServer also exposes the APIs that let Exchange integrate with Microsoft’s other collaboration servers and tools such as Microsoft Operations Manager.
OneServer also includes directory migration tools that can pull in user information and automatically create mailboxes, an embedded SQL Server-based help desk ticketing system, role-based administration for user self-service and transaction audit logs.
Azaleos was founded in August 2004 by Microsoft veterans Roger Gerdes, who is CEO, and Keith McCall, who serves as CTO, and is backed by a Series A round of funding from Second Avenue Partners.
OneServer costs $30,000 and $35,000 with 1T byte of storage. The cost for OneStop Subscription Service starts at $7 per user, per month.
