SATA, SMS and Server Archival

Exchange 2010 is the latest avatar of Microsoft's category-leading messaging solution that works well with inexpensive SATA storage, supports archiving on the server, offers better integration with voice mail and SMS and boasts of a high fidelity experience across the PC and the mobile phone. By Prashant L Rao

Messaging is a critical application for every business and Microsoft Exchange is the leader in this category with a 56% share by revenues in India as per Frost & Sullivan. Now there’s a new version of Exchange out on the market and it brings substantial improvements in reducing IOPS (by a claimed 90%), offers better integration of voice mail and SMS, supports more granular control for compliance and risk management with archiving capabilities on the server and offers a high fidelity experience across the mobile phone (Windows Mobile obviously), PC and browser (not just IE anymore, but also Firefox and Safari).

“The big push across the 2010 range of products is going to be the high fidelity experience across three screens—your mobile phone, your PC and the browser. This is not just from a look and feel standpoint but it also preserves round tripping. If I make a change to something on my mobile phone, that change propagates back to the desktop. Other than that there are things like SATA storage, centralized archival, removing the need for different servers for different roles to achieve failover and reliability, lowering the cost from an IT standpoint and allowing much more granular control for compliance and risk management,” said Sanjay Manchanda, Director – Information Worker Division, Microsoft India.

Archiving on the server

“Today when we archive we create a lot of personal files on the desktop. Each of us is carrying our own PSTs. The IT policy guy is therefore unable to impose a security policy across individual desktops. We have enabled archival on the server in Exchange 2010,” said Amit Mehta, Director, Unified Communications, Microsoft India. This along with the reduction in IOPS gives CIOs the option of choosing to archive on SATA disks. Gartner recommends, “Replacing conventional storage area network (SAN) architectures with direct-attached storage and expanding the size of user mailboxes” for enterprises deploying Exchange 2010.

Industries that are heavily regulated and companies that worry about how IP is being managed within the company benefit from this. “A second benefit is the more effective use of existing storage through archival. A lot of the stuff that you archive today goes into a local PST folder. Now you have the ability to centralize archiving and manage it at the server level. We are giving you the same experience that you have with your regular inbox,” added Manchanda.

Archiving rules can be applied down to the level of individual messages. Retention policies can be specified on granular pieces or attributes of a message. The process is more transparent and an end-user can see when a particular message will expire right in the message itself.

“Today when you do searches you can typically specify one folder and see everything in that folder but it’s hard to go across an entire hierarchy of your messages and if you compound that with archives it makes it difficult—you have to go one by one. With Exchange 2010 you have the ability to do multi-mailbox searches yourself using the Web-based Exchange Control Panel. From a compliance standpoint and going back to the example of a legal discovery situation it becomes much more powerful if you have all these archives sitting on a server,” said Manchanda.

According to Microsoft, third-party archiving solutions end up costing at least $10 per user, sometimes it is $15 per user. By making archiving part of the enterprise CAL (it’s not in the standard CAL), the company believes that it brings down the cost of ownership of Exchange. That being said, it must be noted that the archiving feature in Exchange 2010 is not as sophisticated as what third-parties offer.

Mehta said, “It does not completely replace or match up to third-party archival solutions. But for organizations who have fairly defined needs of what they want to do with archives in terms of the rules and how it can be accessed, that part is handled pretty well. The ability to do multi-query search across folders is something that’s new. There are some other functionalities that third-party providers add.”

As per Gartner, “Third-party archive vendors have long offered PST alternatives, but the uptake of these archive services is no more than 20% of the Exchange base—generally due to the cost and complexity of these third-party services.”

To that extent, as Microsoft has done with Security Essentials on the desktop, server archiving in Exchange 2010 is a good thing.

Gartner also commented that “Microsoft is artificially constraining the growth of the personal archive by making it part of the Enterprise CAL, (less than 20% of Exchange licenses) and requiring the Outlook 2010 client (a requirement likely to change by year end 2010, we believe). Outlook Web Access can also be used to access the archive.”

Using cheaper storage

Exchange has always been deployed on Fiber Channel (FC) which is a robust but expensive protocol. “Microsoft's whole objective is to bring down the total cost of ownership (TCO) on their applications. The reason customers gravitate towards Microsoft solutions is because they help bring down the TCO. To that extent it was a little counterproductive, because on one hand Microsoft's endeavor was to bring down the TCO for their app. On the other hand, its dependency on a technology like FC was actually pushing up the cost. Microsoft was also looking to bring down the storage networking cost,” said Surajit Sen, Director – Channels, Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India.

“We have massive deployments of Exchange on iSCSI. These run into 100,000 plus users. We have sites in India running into 50,000-60,000 users,” he added.

Windows storage consolidation is one of the biggest drivers of NetApp’s business especially in the mid size and also the enterprise market. “Exchange would be in excess of 30%. Apps like file sharing, SharePoint and Exchange demand a lot of storage. Also compliance norms have increased the demand because you will want to do mail archiving. Storage drag with Microsoft technology, especially Exchange, is very high. This is definitely one of the top apps for us,” said Sen.

“One of biggest things that Microsoft is touting in Exchange 2010 is the ability to run on SATA disks. Earlier it had to go on FC. FC disks are three times the price of SATA,” he commented.

Performance enhancements

“We have made enhancements that build on existing technologies such as continuous replication but significantly reduce the number of servers and the storage that are required to support a robust, available failover support environment. You can have failover servers across different cities and not just in the same data center,” said Manchanda. Microsoft claims that it has reduced the number of servers for a failover configuration to half of what was required earlier.

Ravi Sankar, Technology Evangelist, Microsoft India, said, “In a high availability scenario, say, the mailbox server fails and the end-user loses his Outlook connection. It will take a few seconds or maybe a few minutes for that mailbox to be up and running on some other server. In Exchange 2010 the connection is to the client access server. Any downtime here is not going to affect the performance of Outlook. The failover is less than 30 seconds irrespective of the size of the mailbox database.” This is achieved by means of continuous replication. Basically, if a mailbox server goes down, the client access server, which provides the connectivity, switches to a different mailbox server.

Role based administration is a new feature that can help bring down the IT staffing requirements for running Exchange 2010. Basically, it allows administrators to create roles that give end-users abilities that they would not usually have such as the ability to add and delete users and manage the complete directory as well as the classic IT or help desk function of managing products.

A choice of deployment models

Microsoft offers both on premise (classic) and software-plus-services (hosted) deployment models for Exchange 2010. “You have the on premise version that you always had but now with Microsoft Online Services you have the ability to take some of this and place it completely in the cloud and not have to deal with the hardware and software investments,” said Manchanda.

He talked about how a mix and match solution could work for companies. Apparently about half the employees in any given company don’t have e-mail access. In such situations, companies may choose to go in for a hybrid model where permanent workers get access to on premise Exchange while deskless or task workers access the software online. There is a deskless worker licensing mechanism that is substantially cheaper.

Microsoft realizes that hosted e-mail is increasingly sought after and that’s why the company released Exchange 2010’s technology as part of its hosted Exchange Labs offering about six months before the on-premise version came out.

Competitors

Traditionally it has been a two-horse race in enterprise messaging with IBM Lotus Domino being Microsoft Exchange’s biggest competitor and this remains the case in the Indian market. Unlike the situaion in the US where Google Apps is a formidable competitor, in India it is still Exchange vs Domino. “IBM is quite aggressive; they are still out there with Notes. We also see situations where customers look at open source alternatives,” said Manchanda.

According to Mehta, “Last year we won back 4.5 million seats from Notes. Up until now, in a three-year period, it’s been 12.5 million seats globally.”

Manchanda commented, “So far we haven't run across Google in India from an enterprise standpoint. Largely it’s been people in the Exchange installed base looking at moving up the stack from where they are. In the enterprise, people are making fewer decisions on just e-mail; it is part of the bigger communications/collaboration picture.”

Adoption pattern

According to Manchanda, “These days a majority of our customers in the enterprise do e-mail plus task management, calendaring plus IM and the next step tends to be to use some form of Web conferencing.”

Mehta said, “The attach rate of Office Communications Server (OCS), for presence and chat, to Exchange has really gone up. Our attach rates are as high as 57% in the A13 (Top 13 countries by revenues; the list includes India). Exchange and chat becomes the first stepping stone towards an enterprise-wide UC strategy. They add chat to it, then the other apps like conferencing on OCS, and finally integration with the PBX to enable voice on OCS.”

Manchanda said, “The other thing that we are seeing is that people start on the path of UC. The extent to which they start looking at the rest of collaboration all the way from workspaces, whether peer-to-peer or client-server or client-cloud, to collaborative document management varies.”

Companies piloting Exchange 2010 include Bajaj Allianz (rapid deployment). Companies that have expressed interest include Maruti (archival features) and Wipro (cheaper storage options).

OEM solutions

Microsoft has done a lot of work to make the app more robust and more enterprise-class but the underlying infrastructure needs to be equally robust, particularly the protection and recovery mechanism. “If your Exchange server went down because of a database failure, you need to go back to backups. You would lose a lot of information and your recovery would take an inordinately long time which is often unacceptable in enterprise environments. We created a specific solution for Exchange environments which we call SnapManager for Exchange,” said Sen.

SnapManager helps integrate Exchange with the storage. The storage at any given point of time is aware that Exchange as an application is being run. Usually storage doesn't care; as far as it is concerned, it’s zeros and ones coming in be it from Oracle or Exchange.

“Point in time copies create an image like a backup and unlike a traditional backup which takes several hours this is instantaneous and you can subsequently back up your data from that without affecting your production environment. But if your point in time copy or snapshot is not application-aware or Exchange-aware, you would be taking a snapshot which is not consistent with the database. When you try to do a recovery, you would get a corrupted version. There are several layers in a database. There is your application buffer, and then you have the memory buffers and then the storage. At any point of time not all the IOs are captured on the storage. There are IOs that are captured in the application buffer, then the memory buffer and then the storage. If you want an application consistent point in time copy the primary requisite is that it needs to be consistent on the disk first,” added Sen.

SnapManager pushes all the memory buffers and cleans them out, puts all the data on the disk and then takes a snapshot without disrupting the customer environment. It puts the application in hot backup mode, so that the app continues, then it flushes all the memory buffers, puts the data on the disk, creates a consistent copy, takes a snapshot and releases the hot backup. The entire process happens in less than a minute. “Because you have the ability to take a large number of snapshots you could potentially be backing up your data every hour. Usually the best large enterprise backs up its data every day. Even if your Exchange server goes down you can recover from a point in time copy rather than going back to tape,” stated Sen.

Who’s likely to take the plunge

“A lot of customers are already talking to us about Exchange 2010. Many will skip 2007 and go to 2010. We are talking to customers who are on 2003 and want to skip 2007 and move to 2010. The benefits are compelling. The small deterrent is that the clients need to be upgraded. You need Windows 7 or Vista on the client to support Exchange 2010. It's a very good product and we will see faster adoption than that of 2007,” added Sen.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com