On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Brian Desmond <[email protected]> wrote: >> I presume the database takes pains to store these several tables for >> each mailbox together on disk? > > [Brian Desmond] Yes. Online maintenance has been entirely rethought to ensure > this.
Well, that's certainly a good thing. >> It sounds like Exchange 2010 has been optimized for a large number >> of mailboxes at the cost of the performance and space savings SIS can >> give you. Which is great if you have a large number of mailboxes. >> We've got around 70. :-( > > [Brian Desmond] You're gaining way more in performance than you think > you're losing. I promise you this. I'll have to take your word for it. Who do I send the bill to if you're wrong? ;-) > Additionally I don't think SIS is saving you nearly as much as you think. Well, according to Exchange, the ratio is 5.6 to 1. So on our 75 GB IS, that would mean 420 GB without SIS, right? So it's saving me 345 GB. With 15 KRPM SAS disks, at the time we bought this server, that's a few thousand dollars. Big money for a small company. >>> The net result here is that you can buy fewer cheaper disks, put >>> substantially more users on them (think potential factor of 3-4), >>> and deliver larger mailbox quotas. > >> What if we only have one Exchange server? ... Does this >> scale in the other direction, i.e., can I put the same number of users >> on a smaller server, or smaller VM slice? > > [Brian Desmond] You will continue to need RAM and CPU, > specifically memory. This is an inherent requirement of > any database application. Hmmm. It sounds like we're not going to gain as much by moving from Ex 2003 to Ex 2010 as a larger organization would. Our 70 user server will still need similar CPU/RAM specs, and thus cost the same there, but I'll need to have more storage capacity. I can either buy cheaper SATA disks or spend more on expensive SAS disks. As I said before, I bought the fastest disks I could, because your I/O can never be fast enough. That's also "an inherent requirement of any database application". :) I guess what you're saying is that SATA disks will be plenty fast enough. I hope you're right. :) > 70 users even with a 5MB per user allocation is still like 4GB of memory > for the mailbox role - not much. I'm not familiar with Ex 2007/2010 calculations, but 70 x 5 MB = 350 MB. 4 GB of RAM is more for us than it is for you. We've got three Windows servers; only one has 4 GB. The other two have 1 GB and 512 MB. Of course, by the time we get around to upgrading, RAM will be that much cheaper, so it prolly won't be that big a deal. But still, small companies can't just dismiss such costs as easily as large companies. You prolly have more servers than we have computers. >>> Sounds like you're using Exchange as a file server >> >> This is how users want to use the product. ... If this was an >> inescapable technological limitation, it would be one thing, >> but since this is a design change away from a satisfactory >> design, that's obviously not the case. > > And because I want to use a sledge hammer to hang pictures > that's OK? Nevermind the likely side effect of a big hole in > the drywall... Again: It works that way *now*. This "upgrade" will make it not work that way. To continue your analogy: We're using Microsoft SledgeHammer 2003 to hang pictures on the wall, along with many other things. It works just fine; no big holes in the wall. Microsoft SledgeHammer 2010 will put big holes in the wall. Why would we want to buy the newer one? :) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
