VMware, a provider of virtualisation and cloud infrastructure offerings, has launched an email and collaboration offering delivered as a virtual appliance, which helps reduce the cost and complexity of infrastructure management.
The new offering Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is designed to run on the VMware vSphere platform and provides customers the flexibility to run the Appliance either within their own datacentre, or via one of VMware’s vCloud partners who host the application as a service.
VMware said that Zimbra, which it acquired in February 2010, is now fully integrated within VMware. All Zimbra products are now available via VMware’s sales and channel partner ecosystem. Zimbra customers are also now supported by VMware’s Global Support Services, its virtualisation support organisation.
The company said that its Zimbra Appliance provides a personal and team cloud for the end user, administrator and datacentre. It enables dynamic provisioning and scalability, high availability, backup, and disaster recovery, and features integrated security technologies including a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spam offerings.
The new appliance offers multiple-browser, multiple-platform web-client with a AJAX interface. It includes email, contacts/address book, calendaring, document management, file sharing, tasks, and comprehensive search and indexing.
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance provides ‘over-the-air’ synchronisation to iPhone, Windows, Palm and Symbian OS Smartphones with customisable mobile security policies. The Zimbra Appliance Migration Wizard allows customers to migrate from Microsoft Exchange and Domino environments; interoperability with Microsoft Exchange and other leading email clients.
Jim Morrisroe, general manager of Zimbra, said: "The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance delivers customers secure email with the assurance that their data is protected on our VMware vSphere virtualisation 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."
