Five essential considerations for your
Exchange 2010
®
implementation
Whitepaper
Dell
™IT Management Software as a Service
Introduction
Email is fast becoming the predominant form of business communication, and it is becoming more crucial for businesses to protect and preserve the ever-increasing volumes of email they send and receive. With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft has made significant changes in the Exchange architecture to address the growing need of businesses to increase mailbox quotas, drive down storage and IT costs, provide a high degree of email availability for their users, meet regulatory needs for data retention and compliance, and enhance the productivity of their IT staff. These new features make Exchange 2010 a compelling product for many organizations, and make an upgrade fully worth considering.
In this paper, we examine the major new features in Exchange 2010, and address five essential points you should consider as part of your decision to upgrade Exchange 2010.
Overview of Exchange 2010’s Features
Simplified and consolidated high availability and disaster recovery
Exchange 2010 provides native High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) features that simplify your Exchange deployment and provide opportunities to drive down storage costs. Microsoft has consolidated Exchange 2007’s multiple replication technologies into a single technology called Database Availability Groups (DAG). A database availability group is a set of up to 16
Exchange Server 2010 Mailbox servers that provide automatic database-level recovery from a database, server, or network failure1. As a result, Microsoft has removed support for the previous clustering and replication mechanisms, including Single Copy Clusters (SCC), Local Continuous Replication (LCR), Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) and Cluster Continuous replication (CCR). Migrating to Exchange 2010 may require significant IT investments by your organization. To take advantage of the new HA, DR and archiving functionalities, your IT department may have to install new hardware or software, or re-architect the entire Exchange environment. The SCC model in Exchange 2007, which required the database to be on shared storage, is no longer supported in Exchange 2010. The only available HA configuration requires every node to have its own copy of the database. This increases the storage requirements for high availability, although cheaper Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is now an option. Furthermore, the DAG functionality requires Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, meaning that your organization may have to upgrade to 64-bit server hardware. In addition, the personal archiving feature requires the purchase of an Enterprise Client Access License.
Changes in storage architecture
A new storage model in Exchange 2010 considerably increases the disk I/O performance of Exchange 2010 by 90% compared to Exchange 2003 (30% compared to Exchange 2007) and adds new options for a more efficient underlying storage architecture. With these I/O improvements, your organization can significantly drive down its storage costs by using cheaper direct attached storage like SAS and SATA disks.
A side-effect of these storage architecture changes is the elimination of the well-known Single Instance Storage (SIS) feature. SIS reduced redundancy in Exchange Server by storing only a single
copy of an email or attachment per mailbox database, thus allowing all recipients of the email within a database to access it via a single instance. This change will certainly increase the storage needs of your organization; however Microsoft maintains that new database compression techniques and cheaper storage will lessen the impact of this change2.
Enhanced user inbox experience
Exchange 2010 introduces several new features to enhance the user inbox experience of users and improve their productivity. Anywhere access allows users to access all of their communications—e-mail, voice communications—e-mail, instant messaging—from virtually any platform, web-browser, or device through industry standard protocols3. Additionally, Microsoft has added support for larger mailboxes–up to
10GB in size. This is likely to boost user productivity by reducing the amount of time spent managing and searching for email due to quota restrictions. Other improvements that provide huge benefits for your information worker include full-fidelity browser support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari; significantly enhanced support for mobile devices; improved calendaring and unified messaging; and a transformed voicemail experience4.
Basic archiving and e-Discovery features
Exchange 2010 has new integrated out-of-the-box e-mail archiving and discovery tools to help you protect your email data. Seamless personal archives in Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA) allow users to manually classify, retain, and manage their messaging data for longer-term storage using drag-and-drop functionality. A seamless personal archive combined with larger mailboxes lessens the need for users to maintain their message stores in local .PST files. This reduces the compliance and e-discovery challenges that local .PST files present to your organization.
Exchange administrators can define retention policies for archive mailboxes, or archive mailbox folders, to automatically delete messages from the archive after the retention period. Administrators can also create policies to automatically move messages from primary to archive mailbox folders. Users have the ability to modify the deletion dates on emails set by administrator-defined retention policies. One of the most useful new features of Exchange 2010 is the multi-mailbox search. This provides far better search capabilities than in previous Microsoft Exchange versions, and allows users with
appropriate permissions to search for messages containing specific keywords or characteristics in the mailboxes of a set of users, or an entire organization.
The Exchange 2010 archiving, auditing and e-discovery features, though vastly improved, are basic compared to those of specialized archiving and e-discovery vendors. Mailboxes and archives are completely under user control (until a legal hold is instituted,) and tools to support the different stages of the complex e-discovery process are limited. Until this functionality is improved in later editions of Exchange, the native archiving and e-discovery features will satisfy only organizations with the most basic of email archiving and compliance needs.
While Exchange 2010 provides a solid foundation for corporate email, it has minimal support for many of the security, high availability, archiving, and compliance features that many organizations now require. As a result, administrators should leverage the Exchange 2010 upgrade to re-architect their broader messaging environment to incorporate solutions that address these important issues.
2 See the Jan. 27, 2010 report Exchange 2010 – An Upgrade Worth Considering by Forrester Research
There are five essential considerations for administrators while
planning for any Exchange 2010 migration:
Though Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 has many new features to enhance performance, storage costs, archiving, high-availability, e-discovery, and user experience, most organizations may have messaging, archiving and e-discovery needs that are not fully met with these built-in features. Below are some examples of archiving and e-discovery shortcomings of Exchange Server 2010:
The rules and policies available in Exchange 2010 for archiving and legal holds are rudimentary, and insufficient for many compliance policies5
There are no built-in tools to support complex e-discovery searches6.
The Personal Archiving functionality requires Enterprise Client Access Licenses (CALs) and also requires Outlook 2010 or the use of Outlook Web Access. Consider these costs are you plan your implementation7.
Exchange Server 2010 does not offer offline access to archive content.
Exchange Server 2010 is great at archiving Microsoft exchange data – email, instant messaging, and voicemail. It has limited support for other common formats such as
SharePoint files, PDF files, and other forms of data that are important to many organizations8. For many organizations—such as U.S. companies regulated under Sarbanes-Oxley, or companies with active litigation subject to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure—a more robust, comprehensive, and fully featured archiving and disaster recovery solution is essential. For these organizations, third-party archiving solutions like Dell’s Email Management Services will remain an important piece of the organizations’ email needs.
Though Exchange 2010 supports a greater choice of storage hardware options, from traditional SANs to low-cost DAS, it may not necessarily lead to lower storage costs. The elimination of Single Instance Storage (SIS) means that organizations with a high SIS ratio will see an increase in storage if they migrate to Exchange 2010 and use the new replication technology9.
It is important to carefully analyze the architectural tradeoffs and their related costs in determining the best configuration for your organization. For Exchange users invested in, or committed to SANs, storage costs will be a real issue to consider. For a lower cost, simpler architecture, DAS may be
5 “eDiscovery and Compliance Limitations” in Exchange 2010 – An Upgrade Worth Considering by Forrester Research, Jan. 2010 6 Ibid
7 “Exchange 2010 Overview,” at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/overview.aspx 8 See Whitepaper Microsoft Exchange Archiving and the Value of Third-Party Solutions by Ferris Research 9 See Whitepaper Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: Best Practices, by Quest Software, Sept. 2009
Determine if Exchange 2010 meets your organization’s archiving and compliance needs
preferred. Tools like Dell’s Exchange 2010 Advisor10 can help you design the best architectural
configuration to meet your cost, power efficiency, RPO/RTO, datacenter footprint, and performance objectives. With the thousands of ways you can configure Exchange 2010, Dell simplifies deployment for organizations by providing 2 basic architecture models that can result in greater productivity and infrastructure efficiency.
Simplicity begets reliability. Many email system architects have learned that as increasingly
sophisticated systems are architected to improve email reliability, the complexity of configuring and maintaining these systems has resulted in errors that cause the very system outages they were built to prevent.
Determine the simplest Exchange environment that meets your organization’s needs, not more. That may mean staying with your current environment, or complementing a simple Exchange setup with third-party continuity, recovery, security, and archiving services to achieve the reliability, data
protection, security, compliance, and cost objectives of your organization. This frees up your IT staff to focus on the core technical areas that add value to your organization.
In addition to helping you optimize your storage management to lower costs, comply with industry and regulatory data retention requirements, and streamline e-discovery processes, a comprehensive archiving solution may greatly streamline your migration to Exchange 2010. The elimination of Single Instance Storage means that most organizations will likely see an increase in their database sizes when they migrate to Exchange 2010.
A best practice for migrating is to archive your older, rarely accessed, messages before migrating to Exchange 2010. This will greatly speed up your migration process by enabling you move only the data you need. A full-featured, third party archiving solution can help you during and after the migration process by keeping your primary Exchange environment lean, stable and more efficient, while helping your organization meet its legal, regulatory compliance and e-discovery challenges.
With the new features introduced into the product, Exchange 2010 may very well be the best product to manage your organization’s communication needs. However an in-house Exchange
implementation is still susceptible to network failures, configuration problems and external factors like viruses and power outages – factors that even the new HA features may not protect you from.
10At the time of writing this article, Dell’s Exchange 2010 Advisor could be accessed at
http://advisors.dell.com/advisorweb/Advisor.aspx?advisor=b6372fc5-7556-4340-8328-b8a88e2e64b2-001ebc&c=us&l=en&cs=g_5
The best exchange environment is the simplest one that meets your needs
Use archiving to facilitate a smoother, lower cost migration
When it comes to important capabilities like disaster recovery, spam and virus filtering, and
compliance-focused archiving, managed services provide unique benefits to companies of all sizes. For email continuity and disaster recovery, it makes sense to utilize off-site solutions that have no dependency on your organizations internal infrastructure. For security, it makes sense to eliminate spam and viruses at the perimeter before they utilize your organizations bandwidth and server
capacity. For archiving, it is often important to have a 3rd-party custodian who can certify the integrity of the message archive in the event of a lawsuit or compliance investigation.
Today, many organizations have adopted email management services for security, continuity, and archiving to close the gaps in their messaging environment. These service providers are working hard to deliver additional tools that build upon the functionality delivered in Exchange 2010, and to improve reliability, add missing features, and lower your total cost of ownership.
Summary
With Exchange 2010, Microsoft has provided many features to greatly enhance reliability, high availability, usability and management, to meet the growing demands of today’s workplace. Its new features make it far superior to the 2003 and 2007 versions. However it does not meet the high regulatory compliance and archiving demands of many organizations. As an IT executive, it is
important to see Exchange 2010 as an important piece of your organization’s email needs, and choose the right third-party partners to help your organization meet its overall messaging needs.
Visit http://www.dell.com/modularservices to learn more about how Dell’s Email Management
Services can complement your Exchange environment and help you meet your business objectives.
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For additional information on Dell IT Management SaaS solutions, such as pricing or a free demo, please visit the Dell web site for your country or contact your Dell sales representative.
