Consolidation


Your staff probably spend too much time managing too many messaging servers, many at remote sites.

Benefits of Messaging Consolidation

Messaging Consolidation will bring the following benefits to your organisation :

  • Centralise operations consolidate Exchange sites

  • Fewer points of failure

  • Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership

  • Reduce server estate to reduce costs

  • Leverage central data centres and their staff

  • Lower the overhead and reduce network traffic in collaboration with Outlook 2003 with Cached Exchange Mode

  • Greater control of the environment

Our customers have enjoyed these benefits by reducing their server real estate (typically by at least fifty percent), spending less time on server administration and monitoring. They have also been able to consolidate their data onto storage area networks.

High Density, Highly Available Exchange Server 2003

We are experiencing upwards of 4000 mailboxes being supported on high-end servers by implementing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 high-availability solutions with:

  • Microsoft Cluster Services - supports up to eight nodes on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

  • Volume mount points

  • Performance improvements

  • Support for higher numbers of mailboxes

From a client perspective Microsoft Outlook 2003 running in Cached Exchange Mode reduces the processing requirements of the server and the network traffic.

Consolidating with Embrionic

Clearly this messaging strategy reduces hardware requirements and Windows Server licences and therefore business costs, but increases the reliance on a smaller number of servers, so operational management and business continuity is a key consideration.

Embrionic has been involved in a significant number of consolidation projects, and can advise on recommended practice and avoid the pitfalls of an improperly designed and implemented solution.



Outlook 2003 with Cached Exchange Mode

Microsoft Outlook 2003 has a new mode of operation - Cached Exchange Mode. When enabled,  Outlook 2003 uses a local copy of the mailbox, should the Microsoft Exchange server become unavailable, for any reason, Outlook switches to the Trying to connect state or the Disconnected state. When the connection is restored, Outlook automatically switches to the Connected state or the Connected (Headers) state and any changes the user has made to their offline copy is synchronised back to the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Benefits of Outlook with Cached Exchange Mode

The benefits of cached Exchange mode include both the reduction of server and network load, enabling customers to consolidate sites in fact removing the need for local servers. Embrionic has customers who are now supporting well over 4000 concurrent mailboxes per Microsoft Exchange Server with the servers hosted in a corporate data centre.

Note There is no loss of functionality with Cached Exchange Mode, when a network connection to the Microsoft Exchange server is available. Mailbox and public folder access, Global Address List information, email notifications, free / busy and delegate support operate in the manner you users are accustomed.


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