It's been roughly six months since Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 was released into the wild of the business world—time enough, certainly, for IT departments to get familiar with the new mail server and what it has to offer and determine whether to push their organizations toward an upgrade. Naturally, Microsoft hopes you'll move to the latest version, and the company has taken great steps to help you make the transition as easy as possible. I recently spoke with Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Microsoft Exchange, about what Microsoft is doing to prepare companies and about some of the tricky points of Exchange 2010's new features that IT pros should be prepared for.
(Editor's Note: This interview took place before Microsoft announced any of the features of Exchange 2010 SP1.)
B. K. Winstead: Let's start by looking at what Microsoft is doing to help customers make the transition. For instance, you have the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant on the website, which was recently upgraded to include additional deployment scenarios that weren't available when Exchange 2010 launched. Are you planning to continue adding other scenarios, such as migrating to cloud-based Exchange or using virtualization?
Rajesh Jha: We've gotten very positive feedback on the Deployment Assistant from our customers. What the wizard does is, instead of having customers go and find all the relevant stuff that applies to their configuration, it gives them a higher-level wizard to navigate their specific circumstances and find the white papers or documentation that's relevant for their situation. In fact, the single biggest thing we hear is, "Wow, this is so personalized for my situation; thank you very much for doing that."
But at the same time, we don't have all the flavors in the deployment wizard today. The documentation exists for all of these [scenarios], so we will continue to add more steps in the wizard as we get more feedback. As people say, "Hey, I wish virtualization was called out," then we will add that. We'll add online. We think this is a very scalable way for us to guide our customers. It's scalable in a personalized way. It's absolutely something we'll continue to invest in.
The Exchange node on TechNet [has] a whole section on how best to migrate to Exchange 2010. The wizard is just a higher-level overlay on the set of content that we have there. The other thing we've done this time is—Exchange used to always provide guidance in the Storage Calculator—we've enhanced that significantly. [It's now called the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator.] Again, this is very customizable—depending upon the storage type, how many copies they want to use, the kind of disaster-recovery capabilities they want to build in. We provide guidance to customers in terms of how to size their disks, how to size their CPUs, and memory usage. So we've built not only the deployment wizard, which is more like a step-by-step process, but also sizing guidance that is personalizable for the different configurations that our customers might need.
Winstead: Do you have any advice for organizations planning to deploy Exchange 2010 in conjunction with virtualization?
Jha: Yes, on our website we have guidance, and we continue to refresh the guidance. We support virtualization. For some customers, this does make sense, to virtualize. For many of our customers, the email infrastructure is so heavily loaded, and it's so heavily used, that virtualization may not make sense. We've got guidance that walks people through what to virtualize and the sizing guidance if you virtualize on a single box the Mailbox role, the CAS role, the Hub role—that kind of guidance. So the calculator actually walks you through the virtualization options as well.
Winstead: Virtualization isn't covered currently in the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. Do you think it's something you'll add at some point?
Jha: I think it totally makes sense for us to add it at some point. I know the team is going through the most popular requests. In the deployment wizard, we've got a bunch of mainstream deployment options, and we are receiving feedback saying, "Hey, I would like to see this one covered as well." We are working through the feedback methodically, taking the most requested stuff and adding that.
Winstead: One of Microsoft's key talking points at the time Exchange 2010 was released was how it would save organizations money. Is that message sticking with people? Or are budgets still too tight for most companies to be able to make such a major switch at this point?
Jha: I think the Exchange 2010 story of cost savings is very strong, and it's still resonating with customers. Not all the saving mechanisms apply to all customers, but there is so much in it that something applies to almost any customer. There are customers that have been able to increase their storage size significantly and provide much bigger mailboxes to their end users while reducing their costs byte by byte based on what they had on Exchange 2003 by just moving to cheaper storage options in Exchange 2010. There are customers that have been able to get rid of their parallel investment in backup or disaster recovery because in Exchange 2010 we have the database availability group where customers get to choose how many copies of the data that they have. We've unified the notion of backup and availability and disaster recovery into one architecture. So there are customers that have had cost savings by just getting rid of their third-party backup systems and using the database availability groups for backups.
Then there are customers that had a parallel system for voicemail, and with Exchange 2010 we allow, on the same Exchange servers, for you to be able to offer unified messaging and voicemail. That's another cost-savings option. Around 80 percent of customers don't have archiving today, but the vast majority of them see some need to get archiving into place. Again, with Exchange 2010 the same email infrastructure allows you to do archiving, retention, discovery. And finally, for our smallest customers, the promise of either being on-premises or in the cloud, that's another cost savings. They can just move to the cloud and they'll get the exact same functionality of Exchange 2010 in the cloud as they do on-premises.
From an operation-cost perspective, we made investments in role-based access control. It's a low-level authorization module that we built into Exchange on top of which an IT pro can delegate certain tasks—such as the discovery task or Help desk task or distribution list management or message tracking—either to end users or to specialized roles in their organization. So that reduces operating costs. So actually the story for cost-savings is resonating with our customers, and if you take a look at the body of case studies we have on Exchange 2010, it's incredible just the wide variety of cost savings our customers have been able to realize.