eWeek - February 2, 2009

According to Finley, Argonne has been successfully testing Zimbra in a Xen virtual machine environment and intends to “begin moving portions of the Zimbra service into one or more Xen-based machines.”

But Finley said CIS is being very conservative and won’t move to such an implementation for at least a few months. He added that it could well move some parts of the Zimbra service—such as virus and spam checking, which generate peaks of load—into a virtual environment ahead of other parts of the service.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite offers e-mail, calendar, contact management,

Approximately 20 percent of the

document sharing and IM capabilities.

lab’s work force also uses mobile
devices, so mobile support is grow-
This gives divisional administrators attached storage; data older than 30 ing in importance.
a great deal of control, while offload- days, and Zimbra self-backup, con- Zimbra looks like an Exchange
ing central services such as hardware sumes 1.25TB of less-expensive Tier server when connecting from iPhones
maintenance, storage, backups, recov- 2 SAN attached storage. and Windows Mobile- and Palm OS-
ery and availability to CIS. “It’s been a big, big win,” said based phones, allowing users to seam-
Since first implementing the Salbego. lessly synchronize their e-mail, calen-
open-source e-mail alternative, CIS One drawback to Zimbra, said dars and address books.
has migrated some 800 users to Finley, is the limited high-availability Zimbra is currently beta testing a
Zimbra; another 500 are slated to options for user-facing BlackBerry sync, done
migrate during 2009. services. through a BlackBerry
CIS also hosts e-mail services for Both Red Hat and Veri- Enterprise Server via
about 1,300 users in its Exchange 2003 tas offer add-on applica- t h e Z i m b r a M o b i l e
environment. By the end of the year, tions to resolve this issue, Connector for BES.
said Salbego, more than 90 percent of but require that systems Argonne has started
the organization’s staff will be using run in a Red Hat Linux testing that feature
e-mail services provided by CIS. environment; Argonne internally for a limited
According to Salbego, CIS has runs Ubuntu Linux. number of users.
been able to provide high levels of While Argonne would “People are anxiously
service and scalability, helpingit win be willing to consider awaiting the ability to

Finley: “People [want]

over some of the lab’s most demand- switching Linux distri- sync with Zimbra from

to sync ... from their

ing divisions. “We’ve gained a lot of butions, Finley said that their BlackBerry,” said

BlackBerry.”

credibility and trust,” he said. a better option is run- Finley. Argonne is also

The migrations did help divisions ning the Zimbra servers in virtual testing Zimbra’s e-discovery capa-shift IT staff to more mission-critical machines, allowing the application to bilities. ´ activities and freed more money for take advantage of the high-availability basic research. CIS also reduced its characteristics of the virtual machine Michael Hickins, a New York-based storage costs, thanks to HSM (hier- environment. reporter, is the former executive editor archical storage management) func- Zimbra is currently certified for of e WEEK. tionality within the Zimbra suite. VMware virtual machines. Finley