Microsoft's Top 3 advances in Exchange Server 2010

#1: Integrated archiving

During the late 1980s and into the '90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile -- as Arlo Guthrie put it -- that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another -- which can stink just as bad -- is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

It is every Outlook user's nightmare, especially since Office buries this file typically in a black hole within a hidden directory inside each user's Documents folder. For individuals who receive hundreds of thousands of e-mails per year (I'm on that list, believe me), the archiving process has cost users many a weekend.

With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft marketing director Julia White told Betanews today, is the ability to perform this process completely in the background. But in addition, the archived items remain indexed and available, still listed as part of "Personal Folder" but stored separately.

"Today, the vast majority of e-mail actually sits on the local hard drive on those .PST files," White remarked.. The end users love it because they can file as much as they want in there, and they have access to it when they're on their PC. But from an administrator's perspective, they don't like them because they're very expensive to discover, they get lost, they get corrupted, it's a liability and a lot of overhead for the IT organization.

"So with integrated archiving...it doesn't have any change to the end user experience," she continued. "That Personal Folder appears, but the archive shows up and it looks just the same, it's another folder in your file directory, it looks like a secondary Inbox...The benefit is, it's all sitting on Exchange, so it's not going to get corrupted or lost. It's very easy to discover -- that time comes down dramatically. And as a user, you get access to it through Outlook Web App, [as opposed to] on the local hard drive."

Here, White took the bold step of proclaiming OWA as superior to Outlook, in that users still get full access to their mail (albeit with transport restrictions), but without having to keep those multi-gigabyte .PST files locally:

"What got us into this in the beginning was when we talked to our Exchange customers as we were planning [ES] 2010, and we found out that 20% of Exchange mailboxes have an archive on them today, but over 60% said it was important to them. It's scary, because there's not a mailbox out there that shouldn't be archived for one reason or another. What we heard from them was, 1) the cost and overhead of maintaining and managing another system -- new tools to learn -- was too expensive; and 2) the end-user experience. Oftentimes you have an archive today, you have to go to a different UI to retrieve the mail, or the performance is really poor on the archived mail. Because what they do is called 'stubbing,' which means they literally just leave a little bit of the e-mail in the Inbox, and the rest of it sits out on a third-party system. So the performance has to go bounce between multiple systems, so it's very slow.

"If end users don't adopt it, it doesn't work," White remarked. "So this clears the hurdle of both the end user experience as the IT pro cost and management perspective."

That 70% cost savings claim

During this morning's presentation at TechEd in Berlin, Microsoft CVP Stephen Elop made the staggering claim that within a group of 100 companies testing Exchange Server 2010 over the last year, some were able to cut their administrative costs over earlier versions of Exchange by as much as 70%.
As is Betanews' custom (and as is the custom of Betanews readers who see anything in double-digits beside a percentile mark), we asked how that figure was obtained. For instance, we've seen companies in the past that said the expenditure to do something this year was X% lower than the expense to do something in the past, and that typically refers to the fact that memory or storage or processor power is just that much cheaper. That's not really savings; that's a factor of the economy.

So what is this 70% savings a factor of? "A big cost driver is storage," responded White. "We know the storage aspect of e-mail, it's a lot of information and it can get expensive. Traditionally, Exchange was deployed always on a storage-area network, which was fine back in the day when you had a 200 MB mailbox. Obviously, that's not sufficing anymore, and 10 GB is becoming more of a standard. Supporting that kind of mailbox storage size on a SAN becomes cost-prohibitive.

"So what we've done in Exchange 2010 is two things: First, we dramatically improved performance, tenfold over Exchange 2003. When I say that, I mean the time it takes to read and write information to the disk. What that enables is world-class support of low-cost storage options -- direct-attached storage, SATA, even in a JBoss configuration. So big, slow disks, you can run Exchange without any performance or reliability impact." NEC Philips, for example, was able to increase its storage capacity by a factor of eight, while simultaneously reducing costs by a factor of four, White said; and Germany-based hosted service provider Elabs was able to reduce its storage costs by 70%.

Isn't that saying that the expenditure this year is 70% or so less than the expenditure for a similar service in 2003? Yes, according to White, but that's in terms of operating cost run-rate, which is figured according to time and not total investment, especially since companies don't always purchase storage capacity all up-front.

Betanews also learned today that Microsoft's SMB Windows Server bundles, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008, will not be updated immediately with Exchange Server 2010. Those bundles may continue to be sold with Exchange Server 2007 for at least several more months down the road.