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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."
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
That is my experience too. Some uninformed managers think that because WindowsNT/2000 has a familiar user interface it is easier to manage and can be done by less competent adminstrators (or even themselves :-)
Let's face it: The major factor is the system administrator. If he/she is competent the system TCO will go down. If he/she is incompetent the TCO will go up.
Good system administators are lazy and try to automate everything so they don't have to work. *nix systems are better at that than Windows (or OS/2, DOS for that matter)
The reason that Notes users use less e-mail is that most Notes shops have a plethera of other groupware applications that they've hacked together. That is actually a *good* thing because information is centrally managed and indexed, and not laying around people's inboxes.
I've worked at several Notes shops. People have their nose in Notes all day long. Can't say that for the Microsoft shops I've worked at (where things are spread around between different VB and Access apps, and way way too much stuff is done in e-mail for the lack of a better way.)
Exchange has most of the infrastructure, BTW. Just that Outlook is a real pile of shit from a programmatic standpoint (just as Notes is shit from a UI perspective...)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
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
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$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...
Um, don't get too excited about this report:
The custom test was designed by eTesting Labs to simulate from 33,320 to 83,300 POP/SMTP users that checked their mail every 60 minutes and sent a single 10K byte message to three recipients every 60 minutes.
Honestly, if you are using your Exchange server as a POP/SMTP server only you are wasting your money. Exchange is groupware, you do not use it as a POP/SMTP server. Save your money and just run sendmail on Linux, BSD or Solaris. Exchange is for calendering, scheduling, messaging, etc. This report is pretty much worthless.
Q.
If you've ever watched Exchange2K failover on a Win2K cluster, I pity you, for you've surely suffered through the same hell (especially pre-sp1) that so few of us have.
And if you have a lot of users, it certainly takes a long time. The cluster that I currently manage (until tomorrow, as I resigned) has a mere 600 users, a large percentage of which check their mail only twice a day, and the failover can take just as long as it takes to reboot the server, depending on how it's being used at the time of failover. In fact, I'd bet that the SQL cluster, used much more intensively, could failover and back again, several times, in the same amount of time.
-Tommy (who doesn't understand what use a cluster is, if you need to have a single point of failure front-end server to access it (yes I know there are ways around this, please don't flame me))
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
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
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.
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.
That's incorrect.
At a minimum every company I have ever encountered with Exchange, Lotus Notes etc has used it for email and scheduling. Most critical is the scheduling of conference rooms and other resources.
I agree that there are a great many features that are not used routinely, but in the companies where they are used they are absolutely critical.
Many companies have built solutions for ordering office supplies, computers, move/add/change requests, etc. using automated message forms. I've seen these in both Exchange and Notes.
I think you would have a hard time walking into any major corporation and telling them. "Look, we know you use groupware. But we are a lot smarter than you and we know that all you really need is just simple email."
Of course, Bynari also runs on Linux/x86 and Solaris/sparc, for folks with a more typical environment.
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.
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?
And afterall, what else could a normal company based in PC servers or Unix systems put on a mainframe that might make economic sense?
Looks to me like you could put *anything* that could be done with Linux on one of these things. Replace 50+ server with one of these and you start breaking even on TCO. If you have more than 50 servers you would save on space and operating costs. Plus, you would have need for less personel taking care of your servers. Looks like a decent idea to me if you are a large corp. But then, that's just my opinion. Take it for what it's 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