Messaging server plays duel service, corporate role in 2010
Microsoft Wednesday kicked off the rollout of its Office 2010 product lineup with the initial public beta release of the next version of Exchange Server.
Clear Choice Test Package:
Slideshow: Screenshots of the Exchange 2010 interface
Exchange 2010: Webmail features on par with Outlook
Exchange 2010: Better scalability and control for administrators
Microsoft unveiled the Office 2010 product moniker for the first time and Exchange will be the first product to roll out under the banner. Previously the Office lineup was lumped under the codename Office 14.
The 2010 version of Exchange is being touted as a hybrid – equally at home as the foundation for a hosted e-mail service or a corporate messaging infrastructure.
Microsoft already hosts 5 million users on Exchange 2010 as part of its Live@Edu program.
Microsoft says it has specially architected Exchange 2010 for high-availability and cross-domain integration using techniques like pairing the server with Windows Server 2008 clustering technology and directory federation features. (Compare Messaging products.)
“Before, the hosting platform was an add-on, now it is built into the product,” says Julia White, director of Exchange product management.
She would not give specifics on what has changed under the covers of Exchange to make 2010 a natural hosting platform while the 2007 version was not. In general, she pointed to improved I/O performance, and database, storage and high-availability architectures that were changed in Exchange 2010.
But some early testers say moving to a hybrid environment that combines on-premises and hosted mailboxes isn’t as easy as Microsoft might make it sound and although there is good progress users should be cautious.
“To do some of these things they had to do some significant re-architecting of the product,” said one tester who asked not to be identified. “Some might think that is akin to a Version 1 product.” The tester said Microsoft still has to work through some of the kinks, but that none of them are showstoppers.
Exchange 2010, which is 64-bit only, is slated to ship before the end of this year. Other Office 2010 products – Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 – will go into limited beta in the fall and are slated to ship in the first half of 2010. Another major piece of the Office product puzzle, Office Communications Server R2, shipped in February and the next release is not yet on the official Office 2010 roadmap.
The Exchange beta includes a number of user and administrative features, including new archiving capabilities, but perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic is its online and on-premises split personality.
The company hopes that personality will make it easier for corporate users to straddle environments with some users on internal systems and others using hosted mailboxes from a service. Features, such as Powershell support, will give administrators one set of tools for managing internal users, users on hosted platforms, and the infrastructure needed to bridge the gap between the two.
But creating the infrastructure and architecture involves more than just Exchange. Microsoft is relying on new clustering technology in Windows Server 2008, such as multi-subnet stretched clusters, and federated Active Directory technology to help bolster high-availability and integrated management.
A stretch cluster, which is also called a geographically dispersed cluster, is a failover cluster that spans more than one physical data center. They are used for site resilience.
The federation technology takes advantage of features in Windows Server, and when combined with Exchange 2010 it provides users, hosted or local, with identical information. That cross-domain support makes possible features such as sharing free/busy time among calendars of hosted users and on-premises users.
A Network World review points to other features for managing Exchange across environments, including an easier way to distribute different user mailboxes across different servers, an ability to replicate a message store across multiple servers, easier tools for cluster management, and the ability to move mailboxes across databases without having to shut them down.
Corporate users interested in hybrid environments will need to understand all these features and how to build them into their Exchange environments, experts say.
Microsoft is also trying to beef up discovery and compliance features in Exchange with built-in e-mail archiving. But early beta testers have said the feature doesn’t appear like it will be complete in Exchange 2010 and will likely take one Service Pack to hit full stride.
Microsoft’s White said that archiving in the Exchange 2010 beta will not be fully functional.
Observers say users should take a hard look when the feature is complete.
“I wouldn’t expect too much from the archiving in Exchange 2010,” says Carolyn DiCenzo, research vice president for storage technologies and strategies at Gartner. “While it seems to be a space [Microsoft] would like to play in, it appears that they are not quite ready yet.”
Network World Lab Alliance member Joel Snyder said in his Exchange 2010 review that corporate users should carefully assess the implications of the new server.
The combination of clustering, replication, and low-cost disk support means that reliability and scalability can be based on replicating small, inexpensive servers both within a data center and between data centers. E-mail managers thinking of deploying Exchange 2010 should step back and evaluate closely these new grid-style architectural approaches—and be sure that your Exchange team has adequate time to re-think and re-evaluate commonly held beliefs on how to build large Exchange networks.”
