As most of you know, Exchange servers utilize the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) database. As you have told us loud and clear, Exchange rocks from a performance, scalability, and availability stan...
Published Jul 16, 2009
Version 1.0
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I managed both an sql 2005/2000 and exchange 2003/2007 environment. I am very, VERY, glad that exchange and sql were not integrated. Some of the software that used sql 2005 didn't work right after SP1 was installed. What would have happened if Exchange 2007 got an update that required the SQL server to have the latest updates. Presto, instant bomb. And if you think, well, have another SQL server/instance...Then whats the difference of that from keeping the ESE store? We also used BackupExec which worked great for backing up both SQL and Exchange. MAPI isn't that hard to program against once you get the hang of it. Restores were crazy easy using BackupExec.
I can see why using your current SQL Data Infrastructure for the exchange backend, but, when you add in the high load, and storage space requirements that an exchange store would require, wouldn't that completely blow that out and you would then have to upgrade it? Being part of a very small (2) person I.T. group in a fairly large corporation, that should have had much more, I got a very large view of the overall picture, and all the details that fit in it. Also as a software developer, like I said, understaffed, I understand the difficulties in changing databackends from a system that was written specifically for one system, to another system, that is written to accomodate many systems. It would be almost a full re-write of everything except for the presentation layer.
I can see why using your current SQL Data Infrastructure for the exchange backend, but, when you add in the high load, and storage space requirements that an exchange store would require, wouldn't that completely blow that out and you would then have to upgrade it? Being part of a very small (2) person I.T. group in a fairly large corporation, that should have had much more, I got a very large view of the overall picture, and all the details that fit in it. Also as a software developer, like I said, understaffed, I understand the difficulties in changing databackends from a system that was written specifically for one system, to another system, that is written to accomodate many systems. It would be almost a full re-write of everything except for the presentation layer.