Deployment Flexibility and Reliability
The pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile and that means investing in solutions that provide you and your organization choice. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your unique needs and a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.
With Exchange, choose from on-premises deployment with Exchange Server 2010, a Microsoft hosted service with Exchange Online, or a seamless mix of both. Microsoft’s commitment to Software plus Services ensures you can decide on your timeline for taking advantage of the flexibility and power of both without interrupting or changing your users’ experience.
Exchange Server has always provided and continues to provide you the choice of a wider range of storage hardware options than any other solution, ranging from traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN) to low-cost, desktop-class Direct Attached Storage (DAS). In the latest release, continued innovation in the Exchange mailbox database means that you will experience up to a 50% reduction in disk IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) over Exchange Server 2007, as well as greater resiliency against data corruption.
Exchange Server is available both as on-premises software and a hosted service so you will have the freedom to choose the right deployment option for your organization.
Continuous Availability
Exchange Server 2010 offers a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery to help you achieve new levels of reliability to deliver business continuity. These investments can:
Remove the need to deploy complex and costly clustering solutions for full-scale redundancy.
- Automate mailbox database replication and failover with as few as two servers or across geographically dispersed datacenters.
- Maintain availability and fast recovery with up to 16 Exchange-managed replicas of each mailbox database.
- Limit user disruption during mailbox moves, which allows you to perform migration and maintenance activities on your schedule.
- Guard against lost e-mail due to Transport Server upgrades or failures, through new built-in redundancy capabilities designed to redirect mail flow intelligently, through another available route.
Simplified Administration
New self-service capabilities help enable users to perform common tasks without having to call the help desk. With this functionality you can:
- Allow users to update their contact information and track delivery receipt information for e-mail messages without IT assistance.
- Offer an easy-to-use Web-based interface for common help desk tasks.
- Utilize the new Exchange Role-based access control model to empower specialist users to perform specific tasks without requiring administrative control—like giving compliance officers the ability to conduct mailbox searches.
Roles-Based Access Control (RBAC)
The largest percentage of helpdesk calls incurred by an organization using Exchange include: Distribution Group management, message tracking, changes to personal information in address book, and other similar tasks. The annual cost of helpdesk support staff for e-mail systems with 7,500 mailboxes is approximately $20/mailbox. This cost goes up the smaller the organization. (“Email Support Staff Requirements and Costs: A Survey of 136 Organizations”, Ferris Research, June 2008).
- Exchange 2010 allows IT administrators to move specific self-service tasks to end-users.
- Distribution Group management – End-users can create new DG’s, manage memberships and ownership, as well as delete DG’s
- Message tracking – End-users can track delivery receipt information of all messages sent
- Editing personal information in address book – End-users can modify select user information, such as mobile phone number.
- End-user self-service management is performed through a web-based management interface (aka. Exchange Control Panel)
- Other typical end-user tasks/options will be moved from to this web-based management interface, such as: Out of Office, Inbox Rules, Mobile device management, etc…
- Regular feedback from users of Exchange Labs (and other research) has helped frame the user experience with this web-base management interface.
Exchange 2010 provides administrators unprecedented flexibility in choosing a storage architecture.
- Employees wonder why they can’t get large (multi-gigabyte) storage limits for their work email like they can for their personal e-mail accounts (Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, etc)
- Exchange Server 2007 enabled organizations to deploy new storage configurations (Direct Attached storage) and offer larger mailboxes to their employees
- Storage costs still remain a major expense in most Exchange environments
- With Exchange Server 2003, if you wanted to deploy a highly available (clustered) infrastructure, the only storage option available was a Storage Area Network (SAN)
- Exchange Server 2007 added the ability to use Direct Attached Storage in a clustered Exchange deployment, and reductions in disk input/output (IO) allowed greater freedom in disk choice
Exchange 2010 includes additional improvements to performance, reliability, and high availability that enable an even wider range of storage options:
- Exchange 2010 delivers a 70% reduction in disk IO from Exchange 2007 levels. This means that more disks meet the minimum performance required to run Exchange
- IO patterns are optimized so that disk writes do not come in bursts. This removes a barrier that had previously limited the use of SATA (desktop class) disks
- Exchange 2010 is more resilient to storage problems. When corruption is caused by minor disk faults, Exchange automatically repairs the affected database pages using one of the database copies configured for high availability
- When Exchange 2010 is deployed with advanced high availability (3+ replicated database copies), RAID-less architectures can be used, resulting in dramatic cost savings
- This flexibility of storage a choice gives administrators the freedom to deploy large (multi-gigabyte) mailboxes without breaking their hardware budgets
- Gartner reports (“E-Mail Hosting: Poised for Explosive Growth”, Matt Cain, February 2008) that 20% of all e-mail mailboxes will move to the cloud by 2012.
- As companies look to provide lower cost, hosted, e-mail to employees who don’t have mailboxes today, the realization is they will continue to provide on-site/managed mailboxes to a current set of employees.
- Exchange 2010 will help deliver flexible deployment scenarios where part of the organization has hosted Exchange mailboxes, and the other part of the organization has mailboxes managed on-premises.
- These deployment options really highlight the strength of Exchange Server and Microsoft Software + Services strategy. Companies can choose to move completely to the “cloud” (with Microsoft Exchange Online), manage Exchange on-premises, or combine these options in a hybrid/cross-premises deployment.
- Exchange 2010 cross-premises scenarios are tested through the Live@edu with Exchange Labs offering. This includes scenarios where academic institutions have Exchange Server deployed on-premises for faculty/staff, and move students/alumni into the cloud on Exchange Labs (Exchange 2010 based mailboxes).
- Cross-premises deployment scenarios factor in federated message delivery, customized mail routing, shared calendars and free/busy information, shared directory, and much more…
Exchange 2010 provides deployment options which really highlight the strength of Exchange Server and Microsoft Software + Services strategy. Companies can choose to move completely to the “cloud” (with Microsoft Exchange Online), manage Exchange on-premises, or combine these options in a hybrid/cross-premises deployment.
About LG Networks’ Exchange Server Deployment Consultants
LG Networks is a leading IT Consulting firm offering Exchange Server Outsourcing Services for numerous organizations nationwide. Our certified Exchange Server 2010 Deployment Experts will effectively deploy, manage and troubleshoot Exchange Server in your corporate network. Call us at 972-528-6546, our Expert Exchange Server Deployment Consultants are ready to give you free assessment.