Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 Scalability with SP1 and SP2

222 4.5 Leveraging storage technologies

hire and retain qualified staff; it will research the market for the best

players and attempt either a strategic partnership to build a joint ven-

ture and achieve a particular initiative, or simply acquire and merge

the two companies to create a stronger, more capable conglomerate.

From an IT manager’s perspective, this work involves integrating

servers, organizations, assets and application processes, and only stan-

dards can help to ease this particular job. Your ability to present these

abilities and to demonstrate them in action can help you in getting

support for further investments and create a real business advantage

that your CIO will be proud to present to his CEO and Chief Finan-

cial Office (CFO).

4.5 Leveraging storage technologies

The trend for Exchange storage is one of continuous growth, even though

many companies attempt to control the size of the information by enforcing

quotas and maintaining user mailboxes by removing unwanted messages.

As companies strive to reduce their infrastructure and operational costs,

they are moving to server consolidation and centralization, aiming at reduc-

ing the number of servers that they have to manage.

You may take the problem one way or another, but you should always

keep in mind that in any consolidation scenario, data remains; typically it

doesn’t reduce in size and will quite probably increase in terms of availability

requirements. As you were planning to redeploy a computing infrastructure

to reduce costs, you have to increase your investment in the area of storage,

so important for the mission-critical applications such as messaging.

As companies evolved into creating large data centers that host massive

quantities of computing power and are built around high-speed network-

ing accesses, the concentration of data has to be addressed in three per-

spectives—cost, performance, and availability. Apart from these three

criteria that should shape your final technology solution and strategy, the

manageability of this information is growing important. Today you can

build a server that serves 1 TB or even 1 PB of data, but making this data

manageable is another problem. This was first addressed with Microsoft

Exchange 2000 by allowing for a single Exchange server to serve more

than one mailbox store: instead of gathering a large quantity of informa-

tion into a single file database, you can now create more than one of these

databases, all managed and processed by a single server.

4.5 Leveraging storage technologies 223

Chapter 4

This is a serious scalability advantage of Exchange 2003 and a big

improvement compared with Exchange 5.5, one that can lead to more flex-

ible designs that take advantage of new technologies.

When building any Exchange 2003 server, you must first determine

how much space you should plan for hosting the user mailboxes and

optionally, shared information (public folders). In short, you will have to

build storage solutions that implement to various degrees the following

attributes:

 Capacity

 Availability

 Performance

 Manageability

 Cost (affordability)

Throughout this chapter, we will return to those key aspects, because

they represent the roots for any storage design decisions you make. As we

cover the storage technologies you can (and you cannot) use with Microsoft

Exchange, you will quickly realize that there is an advantage in having a

sound storage strategy for your enterprise, both from a management per-

spective and from a storage platform acquisition standpoint.

It is generally a good idea to appoint as part of your administration staff

a storage administrator who will be responsible for looking up these issues,

not only across your Exchange 2003 environment but also across your

Windows Server environment (including file and print services), and prob-

ably beyond the Windows Server platform by including such environments

as UNIX or other high-end operating systems (not that Windows Server is

not a high-end operating system).

I mentioned earlier how storage embraced the networking paradigm: do

project yourselves into the past and think about how networking was intro-

duced in IT infrastructures, how it evolved and how it is run today. With

Storage, you will find the same pattern of server specific components, which

then get deployed in an interconnected way. Then you need to address the

redundancy and performance and security of the interconnecting compo-

nents and links. Finally, you will need to address a level of multi-vendor

interoperability, which is best addressed by standards implementation.