Introduction
I regularly meet with customers and discuss their Exchange Server architecture. Two topics frequently come up so I thought I'd discuss them with everybody and give my perspe...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Hi Rudulf,
I don't recall ever saying that you had to have small mailbox limits in this post. What I did say was that they need to be managed appropriately for the aforementioned reasons. It is true that ensuring that an organization meets regulartory compliance mandates, means that you have to balance legal, IT, and end user requirements. That may require larger mailboxes, though with today's products, that means ensuring that you have enough disk I/O, enough disk capacity, mechanisms to perform legal discovery, and archival solutions. In addition, you need to ensure that you can meet any SLAs that ensure you can provide an accepted level of service to the organization and its end users, as well as, being able to adequately backup and restore that data.
With Exchange 2003, that is a hard feat. With Exchange 2007 it will be many times easier. The move to 64-bit and utilizing large amounts of RAM, coupled with architectural changes in the product, will allow organizations to reduce the I/O requirements they had in previous versions of the product. We've made significant changes to VSS (support restore of VSS backup into recovery storage group, backup of continuous replication model, etc) that will allow customers to implement large mailboxes (our goal is 2GB) and ensure RPO/RTOs are met. And finally, we actually have a records management solution that works out of the box (see the links I provided above for more info on our records management story).
And yes, Outlook 2007 has been enhanced. With regards to search, Outlook 2007 in online mode will utilize the revamped search solution that has been incorporated into Exchange 2007. Outlook 2007 in cached mode will utilize Windows Desktop Search 3.0 for Windows XP, or the built-in search functionality included in Windows Vista.
Ross
I don't recall ever saying that you had to have small mailbox limits in this post. What I did say was that they need to be managed appropriately for the aforementioned reasons. It is true that ensuring that an organization meets regulartory compliance mandates, means that you have to balance legal, IT, and end user requirements. That may require larger mailboxes, though with today's products, that means ensuring that you have enough disk I/O, enough disk capacity, mechanisms to perform legal discovery, and archival solutions. In addition, you need to ensure that you can meet any SLAs that ensure you can provide an accepted level of service to the organization and its end users, as well as, being able to adequately backup and restore that data.
With Exchange 2003, that is a hard feat. With Exchange 2007 it will be many times easier. The move to 64-bit and utilizing large amounts of RAM, coupled with architectural changes in the product, will allow organizations to reduce the I/O requirements they had in previous versions of the product. We've made significant changes to VSS (support restore of VSS backup into recovery storage group, backup of continuous replication model, etc) that will allow customers to implement large mailboxes (our goal is 2GB) and ensure RPO/RTOs are met. And finally, we actually have a records management solution that works out of the box (see the links I provided above for more info on our records management story).
And yes, Outlook 2007 has been enhanced. With regards to search, Outlook 2007 in online mode will utilize the revamped search solution that has been incorporated into Exchange 2007. Outlook 2007 in cached mode will utilize Windows Desktop Search 3.0 for Windows XP, or the built-in search functionality included in Windows Vista.
Ross