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Learn more About Info-Tech
Decide If I Should Upgrade my E-mail Platform
Rock the Enterprise E-Mail Boat with Care
More Details
Your Challenge
- E-mail vendors release more upgrades than are actually required which creates pressure to upgrade twice as frequently.
- Decisions to upgrade are often complicated by new features, major infrastructure changes, and new deployment options.
- This solution set helps organizations understand new features, infrastructure requirements, and changes in delivery methods to assess upgrading.
Our Advice
Critical Insight- E-mail platforms require significant infrastructure investments. ROI is rarely achieved in the typical, three-year vendor product lifecycle. Being one version behind, for a few years, is not a bad thing.
- New features alone don't warrant an upgrade each time a new platform is released. Instead, discontinued support and lack of integration with other apps/systems should be key upgrade considerations.
- Emerging alternative delivery options, such as SaaS are game changers in the e-mail market and can be key upgrade factors.
- Learn about the new versions of enterprise e-mail platforms, and decide if an upgrade is warranted, deferring unnecessary investments.
- Compare upgrading from one version to the next, and identify opportunities for leapfrogging to ensure longevity of the decision and maximize ROI.
- Compare the different TCOs of the available delivery options, over the expected lifetime of the platform, to select the most cost effective solution.
Get to Action
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Get the whole picture.
Determine when an upgrade is needed.
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Assess the features and functions found in newer versions.
Decide if they are appropriate for the organization at this time.
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Identify the infrastructure requirements of newer versions.
Gauge the additional costs of upgrading, beyond just software licensing.
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Choose a delivery method.
Compare the TCO of available deployment options, such as on-premise, on-demand/SaaS and traditional hosting, and select the most cost-effective solution.
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Evaluate the upgrade paths.
Choose the optimal upgrade path for the organization.
If you like this, you may also like:
1. Switch E-mail Platforms2. Exchange 2007: Transitioning from Exchange 2003
3. E-Mail Migration Headaches: Watch and Dodge
4. Exchange 2007 Availability Options
5. Exchange Server: Hosted or In-House?
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1. Decide If I Should Upgrade my E-mail Platform
Rock the Enterprise E-Mail Boat with Care
Rock the Enterprise E-Mail Boat with Care
5 Comments
How does Exchange Online work with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server?
Microsoft offers full Blackberry services for an extra $10/month/user, with no minimum number of users. However, you can also subscribe to the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) from the provider of your choice. The service description can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b895efc-5a55-488e-a40c-14df1c2e7033
I read this document carefully and then was at a Netapp presentation the other day where they mentioned how important their storage dedup feature is now that MS has dumped single instance storage. I am concerned that you didn't mention the single instance storage issue in your article as this may deter many customers from this upgrade.
Microsoft announced a few years ago that it believed the value of single instance storage (SIS) would reach a point where storage was cheap enough that the operational inefficiencies it introduces at the server level would cost an organization more than than the cost of increased storage demand due to multiple, common attachment objects. They indeed implemented architectural changes in 2010 which required removing support for SIS. Info-Tech believes the resulting server efficiency gains, the resulting expanded high availability options and the support for cheap SATA storage in 2010 more than make up for the removal of SIS. We did not address it in our research because we do not believe our clients will be negatively impacted. It should not impact the upgrade decision. However a good enterprise storage strategy should always take advantage of data de-duplication where possible and we are aware that many storage vendors are indeed using the removal of SIS in Exchange 2010 in their product positioning.
Speaking towards SIS... I was an Exchange Administrator for over 10 years in a large organization. Back in the day when you were dealing with one information store, SIS was important. Remember that SIS is per store, not per server. Once you start having to break out your stores for various reasons such as performance, replication, and recovery time objectives, the advantage of SIS goes down very quickly. We ended up figuring out that it saved us about 13% organization wide. With the cost of disk being so low, it was not an issue. We ended up with so much extra space just getting our spindle count higher to meet our IOPS, that we had plenty of disk to cover any loss with the removal of SIS.