Any network admins here?

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by Bluestreak

Yes, Microsoft Exchange Server is a peice of software. It's a common email server side software. It hosts the mailboxes that are created. There are several different "flavors" of this software all priced differently. Lotus Notes, iMail and MANY others are alternatives available.

Yes, you are correct, to a point. If a company installed the standard edition of exchange, (don't know what network admin would with 10k users) you have a limit on database storage. This is a software limit, not hardware. The enterprise edition of Exchange is either not limited or has some astronomical size. I can't remember exact details right now, Microsoft keeps changing the rules. For an organization your size, you are likely running the enterprise revision.

Server hard drives are VERY different from pc drives. High end servers, like what you would use to host Exchange, usually use 15,000 RPM SCSI drives. Email servers are very intensive with their hard drive writes, called Disk IO. There is a lot of this done during normal operation. Currently, the biggest drive I can get is a 15k RPM 450Gig SCSI hard disk but the price is like $800 per drive. For a raid 5 setup, you need at least 3 drives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

If your company is running a RAID 10, you need double the amount of drives than normal.

You also have to take into account how you utilize your disk space. If something was purchased before you got so big, it might not be "right sized" for the job at hand. Sometimes, just getting gear in to fill your needs can be VERY expensive. Sometimes CIO's will approve the cost of the software one year, and the cost of new hardware another.

The 2TB drive Slowpoke mentioned is a SATA drive. Those spin at 7200RPMs. Not recommended for an email server. Not nearly fast enough. Keep in mind the 10k users here again...

The difference, is always SPEED!

This is good info, thanks. I never really knew the physical differences between a server and a desktop, other than the fact that servers have this cool stackable format with rugged cases & blinking lights & shit. I didn't know the actual RPM was faster.

So the difference between Outlook and Exchange is that Outlook is just user-side software that manages an indiv. account, while Exchange is server-side software that manages how all the accounts interact with each other?

[Bluestreak]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

This is good info, thanks. I never really knew the physical differences between a server and a desktop, other than the fact that servers have this cool stackable format with rugged cases & blinking lights & shit. I didn't know the actual RPM was faster.

So the difference between Outlook and Exchange is that Outlook is just user-side software that manages an indiv. account, while Exchange is server-side software that manages how all the accounts interact with each other?

Yes, you pay more for all the blinky lights!

You got it. Exchange (or other server peice) back end, Outlook front end. Exchange does more than just what we talked about, but that's another topic for another day.

[Papa_Complex]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

This is good info, thanks. I never really knew the physical differences between a server and a desktop, other than the fact that servers have this cool stackable format with rugged cases & blinking lights & shit. I didn't know the actual RPM was faster.

So the difference between Outlook and Exchange is that Outlook is just user-side software that manages an indiv. account, while Exchange is server-side software that manages how all the accounts interact with each other?

It's more than just RPM that makes things faster. You can get into things like 'striping' of data on the drives, which distributes the data from a single source across multiple disks. This means that while one disk is recovering from a seek operation and getting ready to read another discrete piece of data, another drive can already be doing so. This reduces latency periods between data reads and speeds overall disk performance.

Since disk reads are the slowest operation that takes place on a server, this can significantly reduce that particular performance bottleneck. That's where a good DBA comes in because location of data can have a big effect on overall access times.