First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."

Comments

Re:striped?

[h4rr4r]

DB level replication does nothing about discs failing. Great you can go to another box, that probably has replicated the errors that failing drive introduced on its way out.

Re:And all the admins ask...

[guruevi]

The time tables here kill me. 2 days for a freakin' e-mail server? Get any decent Linux distro and you can do it in 2 hours including spam and antivirus checking. You want calendaring: Darwin Calendar Server, another 2 hours (if that long).

On the other hand, mail stores can be huge without even crashing anything. I have currently in the proximity of 500GB but I know of installations with several terabytes all administered by 1 or 2 admins.

The place I work at has several departments each doing their own thing. I currently manage a Postfix and Calendaring install on a single box for about 150 users by myself while also doing everything else for the rest of the department. The functionality is identical to the Exchange setup and it's down maybe 10 minutes a month for updates and patches.

Another department has a huge Exchange cluster (a rack of blades) to manage maybe 1500 users (only 10 times as much), they need a freaking appliance for spam/virus filtering and 5 full-time Exchange admins. That thing (although being a cluster) is every month at least 2 hours down (patching and updating) and every week there is some type of notice e-mail about some data store being down or migrated or moved and x-number of users being unable to use it during that maintenance.