By Dean Steadman - WW Product Manager
I’m Dean Steadman; a world-wide Product Manager focused on unified storage solutions for Microsoft applications. I have more than fifteen years of experience designing, developing, deploying, supporting and just plain breaking things in Windows environments. I’m currently working new products to simplify the deployment of Microsoft apps and I look forward to your comments and questions.
I consider myself to be an effective communicator, but like many people I seem to have a long standing love/hate relationship with email. I love being able to communicate quickly with my colleagues from anywhere and anytime, but I hate the time required managing my inbox and how interrupting email can be during my overly inflated work day. I can’t imagine working without it, but I often dream of the freedom I’d enjoy without it.
Many individuals within IT organizations I’ve worked with over the years share this same love/hate relationship (although some seem to be more outspoken than others). Messaging has become a mission critical application not just for the end email users, but also for the other systems that rely on it. Messaging is now pervasive in CRM systems, voicemail and workflow systems throughout many organizations. It’s just too easy and too logical to dump any type of user notification into email.
It can also be a distraction to IT as end users are constantly requesting larger mailboxes, faster response times, support for the latest mobile device, while also expecting greater availability. Add in the joys of maintaining anti-virus, anti-spam, archiving and backup and recovery and you’ve got yourself another fulltime job (added to your existing one). Of course, there’s no budget for any of these things, but as you all know IT gets paid the big bucks to find solutions to these challenges.
Microsoft Exchange 2010 steps up to address many of these challenges by making it easy to support large mailboxes at a lower cost. They’ve done everything from decreasing their I/O usage to supporting less expensive storage options to internalizing Exchange’s high availability features. For customers who are still on older versions of Exchange, simply moving to highly available, fast responding 1GB mailboxes can result in a night and day improvement with email. As is too often the case, these improvements come with a price. IT organizations are increasingly faced with decision on how best to deploy Exchange. Should it be virtualized? Do you use SAN or DAS for storage? How much memory and CPU does it really take? How do we address performance or scalability problems in the future? Or should you just move to the cloud?
So, where do you start?
Start with the leader: HP. We have more Exchange instances running than any other vendor and have more than 25 years of experience partnering with Microsoft. But that’s just our past. Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear more from us on our direction to enable organizations to deploy and maintain Exchange in even easier and more cost effective ways.
