tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179219424167705024.post5273567210852901686..comments2024-03-21T00:12:28.185-07:00Comments on M365 and AZURE Blog: What is business justification going from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010Oz Casey, Dedealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12226180672457689907noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179219424167705024.post-15435461835240390042009-09-09T08:09:08.514-07:002009-09-09T08:09:08.514-07:00OCD, You got this one dead on. I have deployed two...OCD, You got this one dead on. I have deployed two large Exchange 2007 environments both on DAS (using CCR) and they have been great. Managing them day-to-day is easier than it was managing the same size deployments with SAN. Prior to that I had worked on Netapp and EMC SAN with Exchange 2003. Using CCR and DAS we cut our hardware costs by more than 50% vs similar SAN deployments of those sizes. With CCR, and now DAG, you have so many options out there to build a highly available Exchange environment without having to use SAN. I have nothing against SAN and I miss some of the functional add-ins (you named a few) but I can't justify the cost anymore. In my business if mailboxes are not accessible I am paying my customers. Switching everything to DAS was not an easy thing to do. It was like Linus giving up his blanket. I am now getting ready to start my first Exchange 2010 rollout to migrate some 03 and 07 environments to that must hold 100K+ mailbox, SAN will not even be on the table. If performance testing is close to the reported numbers I might be able to drop 10% to 15% (maybe greater) off my current costs my switching to larger, slower disks. I am still not sure about getting rid of RAID, but it sure is tempting. Keep up the good workAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179219424167705024.post-27504390111777713372009-09-09T08:00:32.649-07:002009-09-09T08:00:32.649-07:00Excellent stuff.
In line with my other post we’re ...Excellent stuff.<br />In line with my other post we’re going to love Exchange 2010 deployments.<br />>For those organizations that are sufficiently large (starts ~50 or so users) where a centralized backup, recovery and data management solution is necessary the Exchange 2010 can now be used as a slot-in product rather than the centerpiece that all other applications were too afraid to dance around.<br />>The archiving mailbox is going to rock. One thing that NetApp and the other storage vendors suffer from is memory pressure inside the controllers. NetApp can typically put ~50/60k users on a FAS3170C with PAM1, more with PAM2. But, if the archive component makes a 10GB mailbox look like a 100MB mailbox then the number of users hosted on a controller is going to leap. That’s not going to be of interest to anyone with less than 100,000 mailboxes and frankly, at that point, the use of DAS gets pretty uncompetitive (remember that Microsoft are the first to admit that their solutions are Showcase rather than Best Practice).<br />>Exchange 2010 on NetApp will be on SATA and there will probably be a PAM2 card attached somewhere. That makes the likelihood that even more users will get hosted on the storage platform which means that the storage will get used far more efficiently. One thing that everyone suffers from is capacity utilization. In the old days (yeah, a whole two years ago!) you could get 144GB disks. You could get all the IOPS you needed from a given number of 144GB disks and because the disks weren’t huge you weren’t wasting terabytes of space to meet spindle count. Spindle count applies to everything; file shares, SQL, Exchange and applies to SAN, DAS or NAS – EQUALLY. These days you have to provide the same number of spindles (allowing for 10k or 15k disk speed improvements obviously) but there is a ton of space you can’t use. 144GB disks are now like rocking horse sh1t, 300GB are going the same way. 450GB disks are the norm. For NetApp this is great because we can give you ‘free’ space for transaction logs and equally ‘free’ space for SnapShot retention without performance degradation. Although there comes a point where EMC are right when they say “Well, exactly how many snaps do you really need FFS?”<br />>NetApp, EMC and Dell all have challenges ahead to evangelize that sticking stores on disk is only a fraction of the story. Back it up? Well, use multiple copies of the DAG or use Snap*? Could do either way, and indeed will.<br />>If you’re a NetApp house you, as the Exchange guy, carve your own LUNs up. Exchange 2010 will actually make that process easier as you will see when the Best Practice guide comes out.<br />>Exchange 2010 will hit our relationship with SQL and Enterprise Vault. I haven’t seen where they’re going with that yet. It’s funny though; Exchange is going to negatively impact SQL sales. I want to be a fly on the wall for that conversation when it happens!<br />Great article.Mark Arnoldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04709893016613486244noreply@blogger.com