Hosted Exchange?

Boskonay

But they can now access from anywhere and that's an improvement.

With 4mbps, that's 500KB per second, so that 10mb file will move in under a minute.

Boskonay

As for dag only hosting, shouldnt it be possible to run an exchange server in the cloud just as a passive part of a dag?

brianwalshcork

Boskonay wrote: »

But they can now access from anywhere and that's an improvement.

With 4mbps, that's 500KB per second, so that 10mb file will move in under a minute.

The OP can configure OWA and OMA as he stands if he wants to, to give the users browser and smart phone mail access for no extra cost and fairly little effort.

A 10 MB file gets bloated by 20 - 30 % when it's encoded... 10 now, we're up to 12.5 MB, that has from the senders mail box to the exchnage server and back in again, so the total data to pass through the connection is 25 MB... you're never going to achieve that theoretical maximum speed of 500 KB/s .. what's the best you've seen? 80% 90%? let's say the exchange is right next door and he's getting 85%, so now we're down to 425 KB/s ... (let's ignore the rounding of 1000 bits to 1 KB!)... so under these generous assumptions, you'll the file will tunr around in 60 seconds...

... but that's ignoring all the other traffic on the connection - all other emails that are being sent and received, and alll the other http traffic...

the longer it takes for the recipient to get that power point file the more likely he is to fire up you tube or click whatever link to some hilarious video his mate set him earlier increasing the traffic on the connection and thereby increasing the time it will take to receive the mail.

Sit and stare at the last post on this thread for 60 seconds - it's a long time!

I think you get my point, and I get yours - it would work OK for 40 users on a 4 MB connection, but it would only be OK, and I wouldn't be bringing it up come review time!

brianwalshcork

Boskonay wrote: »

As for dag only hosting, shouldnt it be possible to run an exchange server in the cloud just as a passive part of a dag?

That's what I don't know - it would be technically possible, but would it cost the same price as the figures you gave earlier for a normal hosted exchange, or is there some way of providing a cut down version which would only give the DAG features but no direct user access to the hosted mailboxes.

Boskonay

Hmmm, I would assume you dont need any SALs for an exchange box that just sits as part of the dag? Exchange 2010 Standard Edition supports DAG clustering as long as it is installed on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, so you'll have the cost of enterprise OS.

MS say "all servers in a DAG must have a server license regardless if they have all mailbox databases passive or not".

But it's not clear if you need CALs/SALs on the remote box - my interpretation would be not...

Boskonay

As for the speeds / access issues, it depends entirely on the nature of the use, and the level of internal email (which might be better served with a file sharing solution anyway).

dextor03

It's hard to know what to do. As I said before the local Exchange server has served us well and we get very few complaints from our users about the level of service they receive. I wouldn't want that to change and users start complaining about the time it takes for an email to hit someone in the same office.

We've already increased the line speed from 4mb to 10mb at very little extra cost which is a good start whatever we do. I've also been looking into a service called Mimecast - http://www.mimecast.com which would provide us with virus scanning, spam filtering, backup and email archiving (optional). It's a very good product and might be worth looking into. We could then upgrade our current Exchange 2003 server to 2010 and keep everything in house. We could continue with our tape backup and the backup service they provide would also give us time to get our Exchange server back online should anything happen.

This setup would be ideal for us but I just need to calculate the costs of new hardware, Exchange upgrade and the Mimecast service against the estimated €4,000 per year cost of the hosted exchange option.

I must thank you again for your input on this matter. It’s greatly appreciated.

ednwireland

if you host with an american company, can they be forced to release your data under the patriot act ? ecven if the servers arent in U.S.

Mr. Fancypants

We have a customer who has just gone to mimecast and is happy with it. They use the archiving and journalling features but host their own exchange servers locally. It does require a plugin to be installed in each users outlook though.

Just a note on the microsoft office 365 hosted exchange. Something that isnt that well documented is that by default users will have a second set of credentials they have to use to access their email. The password for these credentials expire every 30 days so it can be a headache for admins with reset passwords and users getting mixed up over what credential to put where.
You can implement single sign on where only your domain credentials are required but it does require a server running server 2008 and active directory federation services 2.0 and a secure certificate installed. More info here : Prepare for single sign on

testicle

Boskonay wrote: »

Hmmm, I would assume you dont need any SALs for an exchange box that just sits as part of the dag? Exchange 2010 Standard Edition supports DAG clustering as long as it is installed on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, so you'll have the cost of enterprise OS.

MS say "all servers in a DAG must have a server license regardless if they have all mailbox databases passive or not".

But it's not clear if you need CALs/SALs on the remote box - my interpretation would be not...

SALs are per user accessing the entire Exchange setup, no matter how many servers you have in it. You'll need Windows licenses for each server though.

Boskonay

Good to know on the licenses then, so a DAG machine in the cloud is just the cost of the infrastructure and Windows Enterprise, so say 1500 a year(ish).

On the patriot act - yes, as long as the provider is a US corp, the act extends globally. (It's why governments/non US corps dont use BPOS, Google, etc, if they have privacy concerns)

Lots of options here tho!

Put the whole shebang into the cloud

1- SAAS option via BPOS, circa 4k per annum

2 -IAAS option, everything in the cloud, circa 2.5k per annum

3 -DAG machine in the cloud, IAAS, circa 1.5k per annum

3 - In house.......

testicle

Boskonay wrote: »

Good to know on the licenses then, so a DAG machine in the cloud is just the cost of the infrastructure and Windows Enterprise, so say 1500 a year(ish).

On the patriot act - yes, as long as the provider is a US corp, the act extends globally. (It's why governments/non US corps dont use BPOS, Google, etc, if they have privacy concerns)

Lots of options here tho!

Put the whole shebang into the cloud

1- SAAS option via BPOS, circa 4k per annum

2 -IAAS option, everything in the cloud, circa 2.5k per annum

3 -DAG machine in the cloud, IAAS, circa 1.5k per annum

3 - In house.......

What do you mean by a DAG machine in the cloud? Do you propose to have it joined to your local Active Directory domain, and have it replicating with another DAG member in his office? That makes zero sense.

Where does the HUB & CAS go?

brianwalshcork

testicle wrote: »

That makes zero sense.

Why not? the OP was looking for disaster recovery options in case of a something catasrophic on site.

Various people on the thread suggested hosting offsite - I think that will be too slow.
Copying the backup off site will saturate the internet connection for a long time.

Some so sort of continuous replication to an offsite location is what's really required, this is provided though DAG in Exchange 2010...

As I mentioned above, I don't have direct experience in this, so I'd be interested to hear why it's such a bad idea!

Boskonay

As Brian said, just put one of the DAG group into the cloud, you'll get continuous replication of your DB's which fulfills the DR options the OP wanted.

You can also have a 'backup' or failover CAS, etc, offsite too, but it depends what level of failover the OP wants.

mocata

We run SBS 2003 with 18 exchange users, roughly 500gig of user files. I bought 2 identical dell servers, both with RAID 1. I do an incremental backup every night of the mailboxes and users folders to a NAS. The second server is in a fireproof safe 30m away from main building, i clone the main server to it with a USB hd any time there are any major software changes, and also copy files from the NAS to it once a week.

Anyone see any flaws or potential improvements i could make to this system?

rolion

mocata wrote: »

We run SBS 2003 with 18 exchange users, roughly 500gig of user files. I bought 2 identical dell servers, both with RAID 1. I do an incremental backup every night of the mailboxes and users folders to a NAS. The second server is in a fireproof safe 30m away from main building, i clone the main server to it with a USB hd any time there are any major software changes, and also copy files from the NAS to it once a week.

Anyone see any flaws or potential improvements i could make to this system?

Dunno...how i test my systems ?
in a rainy week-end,i unplug the net cable from mail server and push the panic button...then,"play" with the backup and DR systems..

in your case,see if your boot controller is supported by cloning/uncloning software ,then see how long takes to do a 500g / 18u database restore !

good luck...

Mr. Fancypants

mocata wrote: »

We run SBS 2003 with 18 exchange users, roughly 500gig of user files. I bought 2 identical dell servers, both with RAID 1. I do an incremental backup every night of the mailboxes and users folders to a NAS. The second server is in a fireproof safe 30m away from main building, i clone the main server to it with a USB hd any time there are any major software changes, and also copy files from the NAS to it once a week.

Anyone see any flaws or potential improvements i could make to this system?

I'd be inclined to have a backup to tape or similar there also from your NAS box. If there was a disaster on a Thursday (assuming you do your file copy on the Friday) which brought the SBS and NAS box down you would be going back a week to get your data.
Having the spare server is a handy if somewhat expensive fall back solution.
Software such as Backup Exec System Recovery can make an image level backup of your server and do a bare metal restore so you can restore it to dissimilar hardware/virtual environment. It has an option to do a copy to secondary location such as an ftp server too which is quite handy.

Only other thing i can think of is to make sure you fully test your procedure. Hook up the spare server and an existing pc onto a test network and make sure the restore works fully.

mocata

I use clonezilla to copy the server, buying the same hardware worked out cheaper than some of the universal restore options i looked at. Meant as well that there were no potential RAID mismatches or driver snags, one less thing to worry about. The NAS is actually in the fireproof safe as well(linked to main network), forgot to mention. I didnt put the backup server onto the network in case it caused a snafu with the main SBS box.

Thats a good suggestion about a random test some weekend, no point finding out something doesnt work when its too late.