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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."
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.
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*
Actually HP still supports openmail.. and will for another 5 years.
From HP's web site:
HP will support our customers using versions 6.0 and 7.0 of the product for the next five years until March 31st 2006. The new 7.0 release further strengthens OpenMail's ability to support thousands of users per server and provide rich functionality when connected to the Outlook client. Support for OpenMail 5.10 continues until 31st October 2001.
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.
> First the budget estimates were way off, not to mention funtionality.
Yeah, I was expecting to see a Quake benchmark.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Not entirely...
If this is a BIG IBM mainframe then it will take
more floor space than a single rack of twin processor CPUs.
I assume that VM programmers are in short enough supply that paying one $90k p.a. is reasonable. It's not far from what I get paid as a Unix SA.
And the hardware is WAY more expensive.
The second set of figures shows how much less you will be paying if you already have an IBM mainframe (for some other purpose) that you can use for a Linux partition (virtual machine, whatever you want to call it) compared to bringing in an NT server farm with exchange. You've already paid for the hardware, the floor space, the support staff. You're just pushing your hardware a little harder.
Does it make sense now?
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
In the second set of figures the same assuption should have been used (you already have a farm of NT servers)...
Not recommended proceedure from Microsoft... Would you want Exchange running on existing servers? What if they are database servers, file servers, etc. Sorry, not a good idea. Anyway, that is what mainframes are designed to do anyway.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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
Yes, you can. The package is called Back Orifice 2000, and freeware alternative to SMS. Don't install McAfee VirusScan though, as it IDs BO2K as a virus.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"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.
That's exactly my point. My guess is that "Linux License" is actually a support contract. Notice that the cost is 3 x 35K, which is consistent with the rest of their "analysis" (3 years), and $35K sounds about right for the premium contract. However, there is no mention of support contract for Windows/Exchange solution (which is NOT free). Apparently they read the recent /. article and decided to get support from Phychic Friends Network instead :-)
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.
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.
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
Hotmail is groupware now!?!?
Oh wait...no it isn't. It's simply web based email. Do you think that may be one of the reasons it doesn't run on Exchange?
Not negating the fact that Outlook Web Access reeks...but, then, so does Lotus' i-Notes.
..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
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.
this was because mainframes crash.
Sounds like you needed better trained systems programmers. I've yet to hear of a crash in any of the shops I'm familiar with (including my own).
finkployd
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?
> 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