(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com) has launched the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance, an enterprise-class email and collaboration solution delivered as a virtual appliance.
According to VMware’s Tuesday announcement, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is designed to run on the VMware vSphere platform, and promises to help reduce the cost and complexity of infrastructure management.
“We’re excited about the opportunity to provide VMware customers worldwide with Zimbra’s best-in-class email and collaboration solution paired with VMware vSphere’s leading virtualization platform,” Zimbra general manager Jim Morrisroe said in a statement. “The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance delivers customers secure email with the assurance that their data is protected on our VMware vSphere virtualization platform, and a collaboration solution that they can fully deploy in a matter of minutes – literally going from install to inbox in less than ten minutes.”
VMware also announced on Tuesday that Zimbra, which it acquired in February from Yahoo!, is now fully integrated within VMware, and all Zimbra products are now available via VMware’s extensive sales and channel partner ecosystem. This enables VMware’s 190,000 customers and 25,000 partners full access to Zimbra’s email and collaboration product suite. In turn, Zimbra customers are now backed by the world’s largest virtualization support organization, VMware’s Global Support Services.
The Zimbra Appliance merges the virtualization capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform to enable dynamic provisioning and scalability, high availability, backup, and disaster recovery. The appliance reduces the impact of planned and unplanned hardware downtime, thereby improving customer service levels. It also features integrated security technologies including a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spam solutions.
Hosting.com chief technology officer Craig McLellan said that the combination of Zimbra and VMware vSphere provides “a leading email and collaboration solution, running on the industry’s most complete and widely deployed virtualization platform.” He continued, “With the addition of the Zimbra Appliance, we are able to provide additional email and collaboration options for our 30,000+ clients who count on us for their critical infrastructure services.”
The Zimbra Appliance can either be run within a customer data center, or as a service provided by one of VMware’s more than 2,000 VMware vCloud partners. As a virtual appliance, customers can deploy the application within minutes instead of the hours it could take for traditional software deployments.
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is currently available starting at $625 for 25 mailboxes for a perpetual license. A “Starter Edition” provides 10 free mailboxes, but offers no support. The latest information on the availability and pricing will be posted to the Zimbra product page.
