Symantec Corp. is introducing Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition, a complete virtual appliance version of its messaging security appliance.

Operating in VMware Server and ESX environments, Virtual Edition helps reduce costs and save time by giving users the ability to instantly adjust spam and virus filtering capacity without having to add or configure the physical infrastructure.

The Virtual Edition’s centralized control console allows users to instantly increase or decrease messaging scanning capacity across existing servers and appliances. Users can also automatically synchronise configurations and reporting across systems, allowing them to better and more easily measure system efficacy and meet industry compliance standards and regulatory mandates.

The Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition improves the efficiency of the messaging infrastructure by scanning and removing unsolicited messages from network and mailbox servers.

“Symantec Mail Security Virtual Edition takes aim at many companies’ biggest messaging security challenge, which is how to keep up with growing messaging and spam volumes while keeping costs down,” said Chris Christiansen, Program Vice President for IDC’s Security Products and Services group. “Symantec’s virtual appliance option gives customers the choice of quickly and incrementally scaling their messaging security infrastructure while taking advantage of the resource utilization benefits of virtualization.”

Symantec Mail Security Virtual Edition also enables faster setup and installation, making it easier than ever to test and evaluate the solution before deploying in a production email environment. In just minutes, a complete version of Virtual Edition can be downloaded, unlocked with a licensing key and deployed in a virtualisation environment.