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Exchange vs. Linux/390 Comparison
eclarkso writes: " The Consulting Times has done a quite even-handed study of the TCO for each platform in a fairly large (5000+) enterprise environment. The article is as much a commentary on the mainframe architecture as it is on Exchange vs. Linux groupware."
HP doesn't support openmail anymore
This article did not even touch on the issue of downtime. For most business some of these solution are over kill. But it is nice to see people give a decent overview off the cost for high end equipment. I would like to see IBM come out with some stuff for the little guy for linux.
Am I the only one that noticed how skewed the results were with regards to support costs?
The first set of figures are skewed in support of the MS solution. The second are skewed in support of the Linux version.
I am wondering what the bases for those numbers were.
Reality Bytes
not one serious reply yet....nerds!!!!
Nice number crunching, but in my dealings with mainframes, I've found the best advantage is that, when overloaded, they just slow down, as opposed to crashing. That wasn't considered in the article.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
Some of the academic folks I know have had a bit of trouble installing Linux/390 (<----- ibm's linux/390 developer page), but linux390.marist.edu/ has a decent manual they've found helpful.
Of course, it'll long be obsolete before I ever get my hands on one of these beasts. *sigh*
First the budget estimates were way off, not to mention funtionality.
Did we count the difference in functionality? Exchange vs. what on Linux?
The mainframe may be back -- but make no mistake it is still the domain of the priesthood. The priesthood that the server architecture was to break up. Do Linux users really want that? A handful of techs who are well paid (the business people are cheering) but no need for the thousands of SA's and small shops can just buy time on a 390.
I like how the last comparison of Linux/IFL vs Exchange/Intel has no cost of support for the Linux part. Come on, last time I checked Linux admins weren't working for free. Sure the tech support for the software is pretty much free due to the community, but someone has to set that stuff up and make sure it keeps working. Unless, Linux now supports itself through magic!! Oooh, I just think about adding 500 more mailboxes and they just appear... Yeah right. This article looks suspicious.
And even if I made some similar proposal, the common response would be that our sales staff would work 'better' with Exchange compared to a groupware solution on Linux. The 2 million dollars gained by the now improved sales staff would recoup the costs.
Total bullshit, but that would be the common company response.
Another thing to note was the fact that they figured they needed 10 (1 backup) exchange servers?
Where did they come up with that one?
One Compaq Proliant 6450 server with 4 x 550MHz Pentium III Xeon processors each with 2MB of L2 cache, 4GB of RAM and a 100GB external Fibre Channel disk array. Can easily handle 50k users with Exchange 2000...and if that is not enough storage for you it is easy to continue adding more disk arrays as space is needed.
That being said I wonder how the TCO would come out over 3 years between the above solution on a Win 2k platform vs a Linux platform with the same hardware and functionality. Can anyone help on this one?
Reality Bytes
Well, not really, but mostly they are designed
n g_ the_wtc.jpg
for MOVEMENT of data as fast as possible. There
is very little logic and optimizations for the
mathematical calculations. There are extra modules
you can get for doing ultrafast math, the fact
remains, when you buy a mainframe you pay for
technology that was made to move data not
do any calculations. Supercomputers are
mainframes that do computation very well.
Compilers for those things resemble giant hairballs
due to setups for specific pipelines, preparations
to do some parts of code very very fast.
Thats why Beowulf(?spell?) is such great thing, because
mass market CPUs are dirt cheap, they do math
very fast, and scalability potential is enormous.
http://titan.puj.edu.co/~pdelgado/pics/rebuildi
once again we see something evolve out of a community and then profited upon by a large multinational. it's going to be ironic to see VA Linux (and a bunch of others fail) but IBM come up smelling like a rose.
VA and redhat and a lot of others sucked in a lot of investment for development and polishing up linux to bring it to where it is. now they are gone (some are almost gone and some are hinting towards it.) IBM jumps in and saves the day. interesting. nothing against IBM of course. after all, linux isn't just for the underpriviledged or any one particular group for that matter. but a very 'interestingly' timed move on IBMs part.
and for all those nay sayers: i guess linux is ready for prime-time now that IBMs in the game?
No, I'm sorry, it was a good attempt, but just too opaque for most readers. Try something like this:
"Man, wouldn't it be cool if you could set up a Beowulf cluster of those OS/390 boxes!"
Breakfast served all day!
I jumped at IBMs offer for developers to try out Linux running on a z/Architecure thingy. My experience so far has been pleasant and "boring" (in a positive way). Pleasant because everything ported easily. Boring because I was expecting challenging porting problems. Everything worked.
Now for the article about TCO and stuff... I believe that it is correct. For small installations use cheap hardware to bring down initial costs. But don't be afraid of mainframes when you business grows - they are not that different.
The article goes out of it's way to be seen to be 'fair' to NT, and then ends with a comparison that shows the support cost for adding a 5000 mailbox solution to an existing mainframe is exactly $0. Presumably this is because it is assumed the site allready has mainframe support resources?
But by the same token a site that uses NT for file & print servers (and therefore has an existing NT support team) should be able to use the same support resources for looking after their Exchange servers.
I'm not saying that there would be NO increase in support demands going from NT file & print to NT file & print plus Exchange, but then I don't believe that adding 5,000 whinging email users won't affect the workload of a mainframe support team either.
So to do a comparison, you should either add support costs to both NT and Mainframe, or neither. Doing it to just one is very misleading.
What email/groupware software are they using on this Linux/390 machine? Is it some port of Lotus Domino server? I am only aware of Domino running natively on S/390 and on Intel x86 Linux, not on 390 mainframe Linux. Also bear in ming that there is no antivirus vendor supporting Domino on any Linux platform so that makes Domino on any Linux platform rather useless, doesn't it?
"For the sake of simplicity, certain items such as depreciation and management overhead were excluded from the comparisons."
It's kind of interesting, since management overhead is widely regarded as the main reason why people prefer Windoze systems to Linux systems. People believe that it costs less money to perform essential administration tasks in Windows than it does in Linux.
I'm not stating that the costs actually are lower, but it's not a terribly informative article if they're going to eliminate that important bit of information.
the comercial they have linked is rather humerous tho.
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
The commercial shows an entire data center of 2000-3000 ft^2 being replaced, NOT an 11-server exchange installation. A more accurate comparison would have been replacing several hundred windows servers and 20-50 staffers with one box and 10 people.
Where are you going to put all these users? I doubt many companies have this many users close enough to the server where bandwidth costs won't be prohibative. My company (PACCAR) employs well over 20,000, but we are all spread out across the nation, the majority being in the Seattle area. The powers that be put Exchange servers at or close to each office with the users mailboxes on them. This makes much more sense because the offices mail within the group far more than they do to outside offices, reducing bandwidth requirements.
Putting all your mailboxes on one big box is going to be far too slow unless they work in Ethernet-distance from the server, and even that will be problematic.
marotti.com
Why do you need VM programmers? The port is already done, the logic for running Linux as a guest OS is there, and it's stable. Henceforth you should be coding on the Linux level, not the VM level.
+tl
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Has anyone tested opensource freeware for 25K users? You could save money on different designs, but this really isnt the meat of the article.
I know it can be done cheaper, we have designed email/groupware for millions of subscribers cheaper than that, all are webbased with oracle/ldap on sun equipment, with network load balancers.
I like how Exchange looks like a cheap solution, untill you grow past your user base, then costs sky rocket.
If I did understand it right, then 70% of the TCO was always the support personal cost. So if there is no need for support personal for IFL, its clear
that it rocks. The thing that I didn't read in the article is WHY it does not need to support.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Note from the comparison, that the mainframe hardware is always more expensive than the PC hardware for a given number of users. The only reason the PC _solution_ ends up being more expensive is because of the price of MS Exchange ($50 per seat, or $2.5million for 50,000 users). In the PC solution, it is the cost of MS Exchange, not the hardware, that costs all the money.
If you remove the cost of licensing NT and Exchange, the Mainframe solution is more expensive in all circumstances, except with more than 50,000 users.
This article only demonstrates that Exchange is overpriced, not that mainframes make good mail servers.
Somehow those numbers look pretty high - especially if you look at the solutions other companies run...
3 6xXeon systems 2 to 1 failover $80k
1 Linux retail box $75
2 Admins @ 75k/year $150k
-----
$230.075
Well, dont know but somehow this whole linux on mainframe seems like overkill for me - especially since the mainframe CPU's arent all that impressive and the linux vm's dont profit all that much of the datatransfer rates a mainframe offers...
Non-techinical users who come one board with Exchange skills may not be productive on the "cheaper" Linu8x solution. How do you factor in productivity?
"Man, wouldn't it be cool if you could set up a Beowulf cluster of those OS/390 boxes!"
Now you're talking! But why stop there? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Crays!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
aside form the fact that the first IBM system he first describes is vastly overpowered, and a rediculous 'solution' to supporting 5000 users.. It doesn't matter if it can scale to 50,000; that's not what it's there for.
Why compare it on big iron? Why not compare it solely on the same hardware?
I can support 50,000 users doing all kinds of neat things on the same hardware, running linux, for a LOT less money.
Notice the Exchange licensing costs? a quarter million bucks?
Keep in mind; most companies do NOT use exchange for what it is good at.. they use it for pure email, though they may purchase it thinking they will use all the groupware features.
this shows up on /. it's favorable to *nix. Bet you $100 if this artice favored exchange it would never show up here.
Also, there was no mention of what "groupware" they were using under Linux. The only piece of information in this article is that Exchange is insanely expensive and requires a lot of hardware, but we kinda knew this already.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Support (4 @ $55K x 1.5 for benefits) $ 990,000
4 * 55000 * 1.5 = 330000
Perhaps you can give us better budget estimates? You might start out by calling vendors (like they did in the article)...
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Those numbers are so off base its funny. Try to purchase an IBM mainframe and install it for anywhere near that, maybe an AS400, but no mainframe. Then the staffing and salary mainframe takes a bigger more expensive staff.
In MS defense those are list prices and NO ONE PAYS LIST. Then what idiot would have what was it four NT SA's for ten servers, boy what a gravy gig. Where I'm at now four people support about 60 NT servers. The ratio is about the same for out Unix servers.
People, spewing out bogus facts only make you look bad and you lose credibility.
I am a MCSE who has a love/hate relationship with MS and their products. I really like Exchange.
A lot of exchange shops do stick to a 300-350 user limit per box for Exchange 5.5, but that is with the following conditions:
No real company has 10 meg mailbox limits
Until the current generation of tape backup (ultrium, superdlt) came out, having a mail database (priv.edb , the "priv in exchange speak) muuh bigger than 20 gig really alarmed people due to SLA's for restoration of service in a server corruption/failure scenario.
So, if you assume for their scenario that they were running E5.5, I would have put at least 1000 mailboxes per server, probably 1500, allowing me to max out at 15 gig priv. This would cut down the hardware costs considerably.
With exchange 2000, clustering is a lot more viable, and e2k also allows a lot more (up to 16, instead of 1) private stores (databases of email) per server. MS has had some issues with MAPI clients and clusters , so I am really hesitant to say how many more users I would put per box.
Overall though, I think its clear that if you have tons of users, linux on big iron can make a ton of sense. Comparing qmail/sendmail to exchange is somewhat unrealist on a features standpoint, but for the major league web email providers, big iron must be worth looking into.
I really think the 10 meg per user mail limit somewhat discredits the whole analysis though. Sounds way more like webmail than corporate mail
ostiguy
To your point #2 -- I've seen user surveys where e-mail is considered the most critical application in the corporation. This includes one internal suvey from a financial company that made *all* of it's money from other applications.
Think that's the root cause of people who buy redundant Xeon hardware for their Exchange servers. If people want to use it for file storage, let em. If management can't figure that out, start looking for a job.
The ISP I run doesn't use groupware, so I won't be able to give numbers relating to it. In fact I'm not even sure how much more work ( CPU/disk/etc ) is involved in providing groupware solutions.
.60. Cost at time of purchase was $6,000.
However we have 9,000 E-mail accounts with an average of 1MB per mailbox ( top end is 200MB spool, low end 0 ). Total storage is 8.2GBs currently.
We've got this running on one dual PIII-850, 1GB RAM, and 1 20GB disk. Load average is
We do about 100k messages in and 30k messages out per day.
Nothing special about the software, Sendmail, Qpopper, WU-IMAPD...
This is one of 20 servers we administer with 2 admins. Uptime on this box is 175 days ( would be 300+ if not for a planned power cut to the building ).
If we assume that groupware would require 3x the hardware to perform the same job. I would need 15 servers to handle the same load. The price would break out to something along the lines of:
hardware $90,000
support $20,000
other (elec, ups, etc ) $200,000 ( to be fair )
Support is based off of total support costs
divided based on time between our other servers.
I really think they used too much hardware in
their report.
There is no reason for such a beefy configuration on the Exchange side of things. (I don't know about Linux... but the same is probably true there as well.)
e Ca lculator.htm
I have worked with Exchange 2000 servers running on a 16 machine configuration (with specific machines fairly similar to those noted) that handle well over 40,000 users. 75-80% of these users keep their outlook clients open all the time, and probably 40% are, at any one time, actually actively using the services.
Granted, Exchange 5.5 would require *at least* the configurations noted as it was FAR less scalable than 2000, but Microsoft actually did an excellent job not just with useability and managment, but performance, when the re-did 2000.
As far as reliability, the server cluster at work has never gone down with the exception of a power failure and voltage spike that some how blew out the power supplies on 3 of the machines (smoke and everything!), resulting in some connectivity problems. Over all, we easily have five "9"'s... if not more.
Check out this:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/media/Exchang
maybe CICS DB2, VSE etc, they are not what I would consider qualified Linux programmers. Not that they could not learn it,at a cost in $$'s and TIME, but the support would have to be a hash of Unix and Mainframe support until things blended nicely.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
they recommend NO MORE THAN 5-6000 and wont even GIVE support for active/active fail-over. M$ current recomendation is 5k to 6k users on active passive failover with standby IDLE hardware. If someone from either company has given you different numbers please let me know. We are in the middle of planning a MAJOR migration from mainframe Taos, Notes and other clients to a standard Exchange2k system. Approx. 150000 users are planned over the next 2 years.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
What about backup support? Is there anyone out there with experience with mailbox/message restoring on the mainframe side?
I consult for many small businesses that use Exchange and I frequently have to perform restores of mailboxes/messages, especially for those users who use their deleted items folder as a storage location. Restoration is pretty simple, but the licensing for Backup Exec or Arcserve are pretty costly and should have been included in these totals.
------------- /bin/laden
rm -rf
Agree with the poster below if your using Exchange for only POP3 your stupid to begin with. The large energy marketing company I work for has probably over 50,000 users worldwide and uses Exchange as our platform. Here are a couple of reasons why I think the eTesting Labs and the Consulting Times is bunk.
For this exercise I am using the 50,000 that they want to scale the IBM to not the 5,000 originally based in the article.
1. Running any mission critical application like email/groupware is suicide on one-box. I would not trust 50,000 users to one box no matter how much the salesperson tells me its cool. That bad boy's getting at least two servers no matter what.
2. If you just want email go with another email system. That's the whole point of Exchange is that you get Calendaring/E-Mail/Web-based Mail/Task Lists/Synch with Palm, PocketPC/Public Folders in one package. I will be the first to admit that there are best of breed applications out there and Exchange isn't one of them for the individual pieces but none of them can be put together all of the features and has the worldwide support of Microsoft and its partners. IBM has the same services but
3. Whoever did these tests have never dealt with users in a corporate environment. Come take a trip to my office and I'll take you to the trading floor. These guys and gals send 10MB Excel spreadsheet models every few minutes and probably, another 10 - 15 emails at the 10K for the rest. You might say "They should be putting those into a repository". Tell that to the trader who just had a REALLY bad day and watch your head get taken off along with the rest of your torso.
4. You got 50,000 users, Chances are spending $2.5 million bucks on a license for Exchange is chump change, in fact, probably $10 million dollars is chump change. When you play in the big leagues its not about price its about support. If something happens to our Exchange servers, Microsoft has people at our door 24x7. My little group of 14 just spent $80,000 for a TEST server not even production without batting an eye do you think licensing costs are a big problem for a company with 50K.
5. Exchange polls continously. Exchange will grab mail instantaneously when it hits your mailbox. You are always connected. You are not polling hourly your polling by the second for new messages. (extremely important in a trading environment when seconds matter.)
6. Unless your Walt Disney World where 50,000 individuals work in the parks and resorts your workforce is going to be spread out likely worldwide. I can show up in London, walk-in and begin working out of Outlook exactly if I had been at my desk here in Houston. I am NOT going to have the London people coming all the way back to Houston and back again to use their email on one OS/390 the bandwidth costs would be outrageous ESPECIALLY in a real-world environment where multi-MB attachments are the norm not the exception.
So what have we learned.
The eTesting Labs test was bunk because it was not a real-world stress test.
No one is going to buy one server to serve a workforce of 5000 or 50000 for that matter. So at least double your hardware costs.
In an environment of 5000+ individuals there should and will be some sort of groupware in place. What are the added costs of buying those best of breed programs to support the same functionality of Exchange at the very least a calendaring system.
Bandwidth costs are a real issue when you deal with a worldwide work force that is in the habit of sending multi-MB files across the network. (No me the lackey is not going to break that)
When you deal in that many users, money is not becoming as great a factor more then the service-level. (Yes I said hardware earlier doubling no matter what)
In conclusion, is Exchange the best for just POP3 mail, no. It can hold its own but more then likely you can find an even cheaper alternative then what the Consulting Times found. You use Exchange because you are looking for the feature-set and Microsoft back stop. For the record, we do use all of those features, we have Ipaqs =). Also, the total cost of ownership figured by the individuals was a good attempt but did not capture what TCO really is, the total cost of ownership for all affected areas. Come back to me with a feature set that's close to Exchange including all external licencing support costs then will talk again.
You might like to tell your customers about it - before they do something they will regret.
If exchange was so good, what does hotmail run?
I guess this is probably redundant but you probably wouldn't run linux all by itself on the mainframe. You would run it along side multiple zOS's which could be hosting CICS, IMS, DB2, etc.
> Which are pretty much matched by Windows 2000.
Wow, I had no idea that you could connect to windows 2000 in a secure fashion, using a client freely available on almost every system, and have every administrative ability that you would sitting right in front of the box.
My experience as a user of Exchange is that if you let the administrator do a traditional Microsoft Office closed-system implementation, you're forcing all of your users into using an appallingly bad piece of software which leads to horrendous support problems down the road. It's not just the Virus Of The Week problem - Outlook Mail, while much much better than some of the previous MSMail products, fundamentally doesn't get it, and it keeps the user's mail in one big honking file that's increasingly fragile and bloated, and has an undocumented and unrepairable format - if it croaks beyond your client program's self-repair capabilities, you're hosed. It also Encourages Users To Mail Around Attached MSWord Documents or several other proprietary formats instead of just sending the message as real plaintext - leads to extra work for the reader (and usually sender), and bloats mail substantially, so your system has to carry a factor of 3-10 more traffic.
Exchange also encourages the users to send mail around with Internal Email Addresses - messages appear to come from "Joe User, Marketing" instead of "juser@foo.com", which looks pretty but fails badly whenever mail gets forwarded out of the system - if you send mail to Joe, Jane, and Fred@customer.com, Fred can reply to you@foo.com, but doesn't have a way to reply to "Joe User, Marketing" or whatever Jane's fictitious title is.
It's not like Sendmail doesn't have a long history of evil on its own, or like you can't build Turing Machines out of sendmail.cf files. But at least it's open, documented, and transparent, and runs on real operating systems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My experience has been that when overloaded...
/var/spool/mail was filled to almost 90%, but the machine kept on chugging away
2) Linux crashes hard.
Your experience completely contradicts mine.
Example:
One of our clients has a mail/proxy server (we administer it for them) running Linux. This machine is 4 years old, running (obviously) an old version of Linux. It's using sendmail (recent version) and squid.
Yesterday one of the geniuses in marketing decided that it would be a great idea to email his recent MS-word document (which was 7.5MB) to the "everybody" alias (yes, this really goes to every user - all 264 of them.)
Now, if you do the math, this is a BIG load to put on an old box.
Yes, it was slow, but there was no crash.
"Fred can reply to you@foo.com, but doesn't have a way to reply to "Joe User, Marketing" or whatever Jane's fictitious title is. "
Huh?
Exchange automatically does the conversion when it goes out the SMTP layer.
I believe General Electric has a 10 or 12 meg limit on mailboxes. If someone sends you an attachment, you pretty much have to save it to your hard drive and remove it from your mail within a couple hours to stay under the limit.
What is this license for? I know that charges for
zOS on a utilization basis (cpu utilization, usage
of OS facilities etc.) but do I also have to pay
for using the hardware to run another OS? Maybe
they're saying that you have to have a license
for the CPU microcode and the license costs are
in turn determined by what OS you're using? Is
it for using an IBM Linux distribution? If so
isn't that violating the GPL?
When I last worked at IBM (a long time back) we had many quads of S/390's and 3090's. Our departmental quad consisted of 4 mainframes, as the term suggests, this was because mainframes crash. Strange really that even big computers crash, but they do.
So in the TCO calculations we have 11 PC servers with one being a backup (wholly inadequate in my opinion) compared with a single mainframe, without a backup.
Toss in a new backup mainframe and these TCO costs are very different.
In 1991 I wrote a white paper to our management expressing how mainframes could be used as SuperServers. Of course, it was expected the clients have the hardware - no one in their right mind would buy one for anything but a massive company. If your company has a mainframe in the z class hanging out forlornly in the corner then it might pay to try this approach. To go out and buy a mainframe from IBM to host your email on would be economic suicide. And afterall, what else could a normal company based in PC servers or Unix systems put on a mainframe that might make economic sense?
I think his complaint was that the Outlook client doesn't provide anyway to directly display the rfc822 address, even with it's shitty customizability features.
Lets say that user A [sheldon (slashdot@sodablue.org) for example] sends mail to Outlook user B. User B forwards that mail to user C. The original message will appear to have come from "sheldon", but there will be no way for user C to see the real e-mail address.
This is an Outlook flaw, not Exchange's problem, because it happens in Internet Mode also.
My first boss bought into the "The 486 will be as powerful as a mainframe" hype, too. So we deployed one on a customer site with a proprietary multi-user OS and tried to run 11 users off it. They ended up removing most of the users because the system was so pathetically slow the solution was unworkable. The IBM mainframe at my college a couple of years before had no problem handling upward of 5,000 users at a time. One 486 with 20 MB of RAM whould have been more than enough to handle our problem. Yeah. Right.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The first time you fire up Xbill from an S390 is always a thrill.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Folks,
.. In the corporate world, you have to be able to do things such as "recover" a significant (L)user deleted email. If the CEO says "whoops, I poo-poo canned it accidentally", you're expected to fix the situation..
You're missing the entire point of deploying a messaging system in a corporate environment. This is what messes Linux up. It's nice that you can run SendMail, popD and whatever on the big hardware.. but.. for my corporate end users, this isn't adequate.
Here are my criteria, sorted in no particular order, for a system that I would be happy to deploy to my 700+ users:
1) Reliable: No loss of data (no PC storage, backups are centralized). [admittedly, tough to maintain with exchange, in the field]
2) Useability: (l)Users can find their info quickly and easily. (search via header, sender, date, text in body, text in attachments, etc..)
3) Manageable costs associated with the above two criteria. I'm not claiming $0 cost -- but predictable and manageable costs.
That's it. Exchange rules at meeting those criteria. I don't want to backup 700+ PC's -- I don't run an ISP!
Which is quite common, for the market that Linux is "trying" to target -- except that most implementers assume there is a *nice* SLA in place.. the small/medium size market is not ready for the lack of end-user features that are present in the *VAST* majority of the distributions.
gimmie M$ Small Business Server vs. a Linux/POP3/IMAP solution and I only have to wait until the first end-user "OOPSIE" as a sysadmin, before I toss linux out the window..
Cheers,
Scoots.
Umm.. exchange stores mail in a database. PST files are for offline storage.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
You didn't tell us how much your Exchange setup cost for 50k users.
It's very nice that you work for a rich company that gets its money from the oil industry or whatever, but we were discussing a report that focused on the cost of system for said 50k users. We didn't need to be subjected to a "outlook is prettier, so therefore better" type spam post.
Regarding #1:
How good an Exchange admin are you if you don't know about Single Instance Store in Exchange? Priv.edb doesn't hold a separate copy of that attachment for every user. It's kept in the database and is only referred to once for everyone in the distribution list.
So to keep it simple for you:
If your CEO (who you think is an idiot but somehow makes more money than you) sends his PowerPoint attachment to 20 people internally (and assuming those 20 users keep their mailboxes on the same Exchange server), there will only be one copy of that PowerPoint app in priv.edb.
Got it?
Yes, that was precisely my complaint; I have to put up with this all the time :-) But you're right, it is an Outlook client problem, not a mail server problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you want your mail to live on a laptop, so you can use it when you're not online, you need to do offline storage in a PST file. In practice, it's also an effective way to get users to manage their own mail storage - if they want to clean up their space, they can, and if they don't want to, it's their disk space tradeoff, but the central mail server doesn't have to do the weekly/monthly "please clean up your files, our disks are getting full" message or the also-popular "we're going to delete anything more than 3 months old." Disk space has been getting cheaper - a recent /. article discussed building a terabyte server for about $5000, and that was before the recent announcements of 160-MB disk drives for $400. But especially in an MS-Outlook environment, which encourages message bloating, you still can't manage a very large number of users on central storage very well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is the worst comparison I have ever seen. I mean... Isn't 11 NT boxes going to require much more support than 1 Linux (IBM) mainframe? Or even more than 11 Linux mainframes.
And how can they compare the functionality of mailboxes to that of Exchange. I thought the point about Exchange is that it does more than email.
How much is the office space saved worth?
..if I had more than 5000 employees, it would be unlikely to be on one site, and I'd like my computing and email facilities to be distributed so that a disaster (e.g. fire, flood, planes crashing into building) was not fatal to organisation operation. In that light having a number of boxes over the country or site rather than a big lump of metal in one place looks very attractive.
Even if I did have one massive site, I would like some ability to continue operations if one building was out of action for any reason. In that light, even as a Linux junkie I wouldn't support the idea of buying a single big IBM system. The words 'putting all my eggs into one basket' seem to come to mind.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Is anyone out there in /. land using Notes on Linux? To support 1000 users in 7 locations (one location is 4 offices with 24Gb of fiber between them so it might as well be one office), we must have about 70 NT boxes. How many of them do you think crash every day? We've just put a new ATM system in, so we could trash a lot of the replicas. It it helps, we're on 5.07.
Oh, and yes the UI for Notes does suck, but there's nothing to stop you writing your own. I haven't seen anything to beat it for groupware apps - we do all sorts of workflow things in it. And all our web stuff runs Domino - how many CERT advisories for that?
I'll be modded offtopic, but I do want to know.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
how can the end numbers be so far apart from eachother, you ask? ah, the Linux solution doesn't need support. Ah, so users can add/configure/remove/backup/restore their own GROUPWARE data and do their OWN support! how neat. (while on exchange they need a $990,000,- costing support team. huh?). The mainframe also doesn't need an UPS, the exchange servers need it. I wonder, does the mainframe, costing $125,000,- come with a $135,000,- costing UPS? if so, why not buy a mainframe just for the UPS in the Exchange situation! Saves you $10,000.- plus you have a mainframe for free!
The more poop like this is spread, the more credit Linux is loosing. Exchange is a resource hog, but that has a reason: it stores the data on the server, to make sharing data easier. (that's the point of groupware in case you wonder what the difference between just email of 1KB a pop and groupware with lots of documents is).
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Exchange automatically does the conversion when it goes out the SMTP layer
There appears to be a clause missing from your sentence, it should read "Exchange should automatically" or "Exchange fails to automatically".
no, PST files are for cunts. OST files are for offline storage, mirroring the central database, but no-one with half a brain will ever seriously mention PSTs...
Knowing people at Equant, I can tell you this numbers game is creative accounting and has no relevance to reality.
The reality is that the IT PTB love Notes, and are anti MS. They still run Novell for eg.
They have internal power struggles with some IT depts wanting Windows 2000 and Exchange but the old guard still rule.
As an aside, the figures are terribly misleading.
As someone pointed out, it doesnt compare like for like the functionality of the systems.
Also, for 25000 users you dont need that many servers, you need about 10 8500 Compaq user servers. It also doesnt take into account any deal you could cut with MS on licencing.
It doesnt take into account support costs of the front end. It doesnt explain that POP data held on client is very bad compared to Exchange keeping data centrally on servers.
(but you would need archiving)
Its a pretty skewed comparison from an obvious pro *NIX website.
Although there is no real standard for it, most mail clients will add the sender's name and email address to the qoute ("On Tuesday, Foo <foo@bar.com> wrote:...").
Outlook doesn't do so, so you can't even tell which company the quoted person belongs to, or what their Internet mail address might be. And don't get me started on the malpractice of adding your own blurb to the top of the message, and having the original one in full at the bottom...
Yeah, the e-cache bug. When I worked for Sun we had lots of complains about it. Lot's of cpus had to be changed with the Sony made ones. All Sun did was tell the customers to keep the patch level up to date (kernel patch 23 for Solaris 2.6 users) but they never found a real solution. Bad thing is when your shinny new E10K goes down because of a faulty cpu.
True - exchange tries to be groupware. However, it is always a day late and a dollar short.
Hotmail tried to run exchange but gave up because it didn't scale.
0) The most common way to run Linux 390 is to run it as a guest under VM. Not natively and not in an LPAR. There continue to be some problems with the Kernel vis a vis task scheduling and interrupts where the kernel expects to have uninterrupted access to the HW. This is what limits the use of complex firewall rules running in gated if you try to run virtual routers/firewalls. So the work tuning Linux on 390 isn't done yet.
1) Nobody has a 10MB mailbox. We have corp dictat to keep them under 250MB and most people complain about that. So you have to use some realistic number. You also have to consider that email/groupware is the poor man's ftp in the corp so you have to be able to bulk move all kinds of very large attachments.
2) The support costs for Linux 390 or essentially the same as for any other kind of Linux because IT IS Linux. 99% of a sysadmins job would never touch VM even if running as a guest of VM.
3) Do you really want to manage all the security problems, viruses and macro hacks for 50,000 Exchange users?
Look at the numbers at the very bottom:
Exchange got $135K for a UPS while the other server was "existing" so it got $0.
Exchange got $990K for support while the other got $0.
Even you Microsoft haters out there can't POSSIBLY call this a fair comparison.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
This may be a stupid question, but why pay for Linux support when you have 4 admins/programmers?
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Just like many other articles on this site, this is grossly biased toward Linux. First of all, POP3/SMTP is NOT groupware, it is email. Exchange is groupware. Second, they don't even say whether the costs are for Exchange 5.5 or E2K. It would make a big difference in support costs. E2K servers can be placed in administrative groups that allow you to administer them as one. One dedicated and qualified person could probably support 50 E2K servers. Another thing is disk space. A groupware system is used for file storage/transfer (by many users) as well as messaging. If you used the Linux "groupware" solution for file storage/transfer, it would eat more disk space. When people attach a file in Exchange and send it to 25 users, There is still only one copy of it stored on the Exchange server. I don't think the Linux solution would do the same. I don't have the time to continue this discussion, I just wanted to point out more inconsistencies in the article's cost estimates.
Does anyone know what groupware (calendar, etc) they are using for the linux part of this comparison? Does it have a windows client, or integrate with Outlook?
I know how much fun it is to support Exchange, but our users demand integrated groupware on the Windows platform, so it's hard to justify a solution that has to be run in a browser or worse, only runs on Linux.
second society
So where is the supports costs for IFL in the last cost comparsion chart. Does he expect people who support IFL to work for free just because the software is gimme a break.
> as the main reason why people prefer Windoze systems to Linux systems.
no, no, no. That's "depreciated managers' heads" that leadsto such solutions.
hawk
News flash!! Not all Muslims are 'evil.' I agree that the ones who beleive Jihad should be taken to _this_ level need to be dealt with; but they should be dealt with in a civilized way. We have a responsility as the greatest nation to punish those responsible in a civilized, American manner. If we were, I hate to say, dealing with 'murders,' the state (*NY, for example*) would not be legally allowed to indict a person on said charges without proof. Now while we, Americans watching CNN and Fox News, _beleive_ we all kinds of proof that points at Osama bin Laden and/or Afghanistan, we must make _CERTAIN_ that they are truly responsible. Americans are very impatient; we _want_ everything (answers, products, laws, etc) NOW. It appears to me that many Americans would prefer to have a person wrongfully imprisoned,etc rather than _KNOW_ the persons charged are actually responsible.
If we find that these acts were not perpetrated by an individual or individuals but were planned/financed/supported by a nation or nations, then these acts should be interpreted as acts of war and we (and our Allies) should respond accordingly. Don't get me wrong. I have yet to see any proof (which of course is only being provided by the media, and thus not complete) that would lead me to beleive anyone _other_ than bin Laden was responsible; but we must be certain... before we declare war.
-Bob
If your company has an Exchange server and the clients are using .pst files (which you describe as being the one big honking file) then you have a bunch of misconfigured clients.
Exchange allows for all mail to be stored in a central database file(s) {starting with Exchange 2000 you can have multiple files} on the server. This allows for single instance storage. Which means if user A sends a 10MB file to 100 users on the Exchange server it takes up, gasp, 10MB. Try that with sendmail and you will quickly have 1GB of diskspace taken up on the server.
Exchange has a lot of useful, powerful features. It runs well. There are thousands of very large corporations using it. It also has it's share of problems, just like Sendmail does of it's own.
While it is very nice to see some comparissons with open source software faring better than the competition, it is also noteworthy to remember that the study is incomplete in some respects.
1. It does not show the functionality differences of the two solutions showing the differences in implementation or even the superiority. It tries to assume that they are but in reality they are not.
2. Performance is not discussed also in more detail and probably the author assumes the Linux on mainframe is much better.
3. Resilience in case of failure is also not inlcuded. While the Windows solution has a spare server, the IBM mainframe solution assumes that it does not fail as it does not have a backup machine.
This only shows that the mainframe solution is very attractive if you are an existing IBM shop and has existing hardware and an additional platform is not a big issue.
Return the bells of Balangiga.
This is why the Network Dispatcher product from IBM is so good (the free software equivalent of the technology is called something that I cant remember - sorry). What you have in that case is a solution that only handles the initiation of the connection (SYN packet in the case of TCP) and the ACKs and the rest of the protocol exchange is directly between the client and the origin server. The overhead is minimal.
OTOH, DNS round-robin has the flaws that you mentioned. It is more likely that the DNS server will fail, since the entire connection lifetime is routed through the DNS server. However DNS servers are typically run will one or more secondary servers - which might mitigate that solution.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
You are missing some numbers in your TCO. TCO for exchange must include the licensing for Outlook, part of Office. Let's face reality here. If your company is using Exchange, it is using Outlook. If it is using Outlook, it is most likely doing so from Office.
The new costs of Office are a couple hundred *per year*, *per user*. The exact figures per user are variable due to the myriad of options available. They range from a 40% to a 70% increase in annual costs, just for the licensing of Office.
From Gartner's Director of Research:
"We ran through a calculation for a typical organization with 5,000 desktops running Microsoft Office that upgrades every four years. The increase in upgrade costs was between $900,000 and $1.6 million more under Software Assurance".
Over a period of four years, this represents an increase of 255,000 to 400,000 per annum. Note, that these costs are borne by the aforementioned annual license rental.
Of course, some could say your analysis is a bit skewered, given that NT, come October first, will not be on the list of "current", or even "not current" software versions allowed. As a result, thast NT license is fairly useless for your new Exchange server, as you'll be needing to upgrade to 2k or XP. More costs involved.
The catch is that Microsoft is dropping perpetual use licenses. So, if you want to run MS servers legally, you'll have no choice but to incur the costs.
I;'d be interested in how you come up with this 35$/CAL figure. The info I have shows that for a 5000 CAL set, you will be paying 67$/CAL (MS is droppng valume CAL discounts, apparently). This would have put your 5000 licenses for Exchange access at $333,325; Note this is for 4975, as the server license comes with 25 CALs. Nearly double your figure, and we have just covered the CALs. The server license, for Exchange2k, is ~700-3000 USD. If you are running with 5000 clients, that will put you into the category of people running Exchange Enterprise, thus, the cost of your server license (exchange only) is more akin to 3000, not the 600 you gave. (Costs taken from win2000 magazine.)
It is quite possible, you are working off rather old data, especially given your reference to the NT licesne, as opposed to the 2k license. That only illustrates the increase in licensing cost, which should be factored into a three year TCO. Your TCO does not cover this, nor does it cover the new MS licensing scheme (from what limited data they have put out).
With per annum costs for maintaining the Office (for Outlook) licensing, you are looking at (212 x 5000) = 1,060,000, plus the cost of the initial purchase or uppgrade of the office suite.
Now, before you spout off about the client being unneccesary in TCO, a TCO analysis, when done properly, will inlude both ends of a client server. If you intend to use a mail client that does not utilize the Exchange server's features (at least those which other, much cheaper of free servers offer), you will have to justify the server choice. For this reason, proper TCO must include the client access software costs.
It may be possible to substitute office for the web-access outlook, but there you begin to lose functionality, changing the comparison yet again.
In any event, your numbers fall short of simple reality by at a historical minimum of ~ 162,325 dollars. Given that the history use din thos enumbers will be just that as of Oct 1, your numbers are severely under reality. Even figure the Outlook part of the 1,060,000 at one fifth, then you still have per annum licensing costs of ~ 212,000. That is assuming MS does not put per annum costs on the Exchange server license, and/or the CAL. Before saying that would not happen, consult the recent changes that represent the same level of cost model change.
Your three year TCO for the Exchange is more on the order of ~1.5 million USD.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It's still possible to only buy time on a S390 -- for small shops, you can outsource all your datacenter stuff and just have a few Linux support personnel that do their work on a remote (who cares?) VM.
I anticipate that IBM will make this a widely deployed solution soon.
JS
Exchange itself is not groupware. The infrastructure is messaging. That's it.
... all messaging. Even the calendar sucks ...
...
Calendaring, scheduling, messaging
You post is pretty much useless. Go look at Notes or E-Room
__joel
As if you'd go out and buy 10,000 PC's this guy is a complete fool...
If you wanted to serve 50,000 emails on exchange server you would use a big compaq proliant machine with 30 processors 10 gig memory and a version of MS Datacenter server.
Cost $1M still less than IBM...
IBM is not and will not ever be the cheapest solution... You guys need a head check to even think for a second this was right...