Any network admins here?

[pauldun170]

oh yeah...

I'm not a network admin.

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by pauldun170

An uneducated opinion is another way of saying ingnorance and your continued yapping means....

Of course it is, they're interchangeable and it matters not to me which one is used. I am ignorant on this issue, that's why I posed the question. But so far, what's been posted hasn't provided a dollar figure of how much it typically costs to run my existing system, how much more it would cost to increase it, or a plain English description of what the various pieces of equipment do. Your post about processor cores, groups, light/medium/heavy users etc. made no sense to me, so I'll just drop it. I'll let you go back to your Defense Weekly or Jane's Aviation or whatever it is you read

[buzzcutt2]

Not to mention the fact that your company likely is using some sort of SAN and RAID configuration for redundancy and speed. If you had 100 users accessing 1 drive - it would be unbearable.

[Bluestreak]

I'd kick you back to 150mb just for complaining about it in the first place.

[Bluestreak]

Hardware for an email server is only half the battle. If you are running Microsoft Exchange like a good little enterprise, you’re looking at spending a small truck load of money in licensing alone. 1 Exchange license (or CAL) is about $60 per person. With 10,000 users, well, you do the math.
A good SAN with 3TB of storage will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30k. Multiply that times 2 for replication.

Then you probably have multiple servers’ setup in a cluster. Average server cost is probably in the $15,000 range after you add all the necessary ram and disk space for the server install. Ram still isn’t cheap when you need 20 gig per box. Figure on at least 3 large boxes for 10,000 users and that’s on the conservative side.

Just as a comparison, we have over $15,000 invested in our email server for 200 users. That’s just licensing and hardware. Backup is a whole other story.

Now, take into account that you have to backup that 3TB of disk space. I know you‘re working with 2, but you always need free space, and at least 30%.

How do you backup 3Tb of data (keep in mind this is for email alone) and make it available offsite. There are lots of ways to do this and they all cost money.

Bottom line is, servers = mo money.

[pauldun170]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

Of course it is, they're interchangeable and it matters not to me which one is used. I am ignorant on this issue, that's why I posed the question. But so far, what's been posted hasn't provided a dollar figure of how much it typically costs to run my existing system, how much more it would cost to increase it, or a plain English description of what the various pieces of equipment do. Your post about processor cores, groups, light/medium/heavy users etc. made no sense to me, so I'll just drop it. I'll let you go back to your Defense Weekly or Jane's Aviation or whatever it is you read

I'm not paying subscription fees...

asshole

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by Bluestreak

Hardware for an email server is only half the battle. If you are running Microsoft Exchange like a good little enterprise, you’re looking at spending a small truck load of money in licensing alone. 1 Exchange license (or CAL) is about $60 per person. With 10,000 users, well, you do the math.
A good SAN with 3TB of storage will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30k. Multiply that times 2 for replication.

Then you probably have multiple servers’ setup in a cluster. Average server cost is probably in the $15,000 range after you add all the necessary ram and disk space for the server install. Ram still isn’t cheap when you need 20 gig per box. Figure on at least 3 large boxes for 10,000 users and that’s on the conservative side.

Just as a comparison, we have over $15,000 invested in our email server for 200 users. That’s just licensing and hardware. Backup is a whole other story.

Now, take into account that you have to backup that 3TB of disk space. I know you‘re working with 2, but you always need free space, and at least 30%.

How do you backup 3Tb of data (keep in mind this is for email alone) and make it available offsite. There are lots of ways to do this and they all cost money.

Bottom line is, servers = mo money.

1) Exchange is a piece of software, right? Just curious, what does it do?
2) I would see Exchange (license costs) as being a fixed cost that wouldn’t be affected if a decision was made to increase user’s inbox size, correct?
3) The cheap 2TB servers Slowpoke mentioned, I guess they probably don’t have much RAM, right? If so, then yes that would have to be upgraded, but other than that, what’s the real difference between those servers and expensive servers?

[karl_1052]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

) The cheap 2TB servers Slowpoke mentioned, I guess they probably don’t have much RAM, right? If so, then yes that would have to be upgraded, but other than that, what’s the real difference between those servers and expensive servers?

Slowpoke mentioned a 2TB hard drive, not a server.

[Bluestreak]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

1) Exchange is a piece of software, right? Just curious, what does it do?
2) I would see Exchange (license costs) as being a fixed cost that wouldn’t be affected if a decision was made to increase user’s inbox size, correct?
3) The cheap 2TB servers Slowpoke mentioned, I guess they probably don’t have much RAM, right? If so, then yes that would have to be upgraded, but other than that, what’s the real difference between those servers and expensive servers?

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!

[Slowpoke]

Just for the record, I am a girl

Secondly I posted that kind of quickly about the 2tb drives. The more I think about it, they probably wouldn't work in a server well, at least the type I run at work. That would most likely be a drive you'd put into a desktop. For business of course you'd pay through the nose for that kind of space.