Azaleos Corporation announced that it will expand its market leading Managed Exchange Services to also support Exchange 2010 when it ships later this year, and starting immediately is offering a free basic upgrade to E2010 and migration of 500 mailboxes. To help customers maintain the highest levels of uptime for E2010, Azaleos also announced a new monitoring service for F5 Local Traffic Manager (LTM) appliances. This new offering is designed to increase the fault tolerance and maintain the high availability of the Exchange Client Access Service (CAS), which was redesigned to be the central hub of E2010.

To help existing Exchange customers take advantage of the powerful new capabilities in E2010, Azaleos is expanding its market-leading Managed Exchange Services and offering a limited time free upgrade program. New Azaleos customers will be eligible for a free basic upgrade, which includes the installation and configuration of E2010 infrastructure, and the migration of 500 e-mail boxes.

The new Azaleos remotely managed service for Exchange 2010 will be available with the general availability of E2010 in November. Customers who take advantage of this upgrade offer can begin to design a customized E2010 system and plan their migration today.

“Exchange 2010 offers customers a powerful set of new capabilities that address storage, performance, and web client ease-of-use limitations in the current version,” said Scott Gode, vice president of marketing and product management for Azaleos. “The free upgrade program and new monitoring service for F5 load balancers are designed to help customers move easily, safely, and cost-effectively to Exchange 2010.”

With the release of E2010, Microsoft has redesigned the CAS to handle connectivity for all major endpoint technologies in Exchange including Outlook, Outlook Web Access, ActiveSync, and more. This increased dependency on CAS creates a potential single point of failure that can bring down all E2010 services. To deliver the highest levels of resilience for CAS, Azaleos has built a new 24X7X365 monitoring functionality for F5 LTM appliances. Azaleos has extended its monitoring and reporting capabilities to cover metrics collected by the BIG-IP, such as capacity, availability, and network performance. This service provides continuous insight into the F5 LTM products, which play a critical role in managing the flow of traffic and services between multiple front-end servers in Exchange deployments.

“Traffic management and intelligent load balancing have always played a central role in large Exchange environments, and with the changes in Exchange 2010 they are even more critical for preventing outages,” said Calvin Rowland, Sr. Director of Business Development for F5. “The new Azaleos monitoring service for F5 Local Traffic Manager appliances ensures these devices are operating and properly configured at all times, and prevents avoidable downtime by making access to the Exchange Client Access Servers virtually bullet proof.”