Microsoft unveils Exchange Server 2010 public beta
by Volker Weber
Microsoft Corp. today released a public beta of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, part of Microsoft’s unified communications family
Comments
One of the interesting features of Exchange 2010, and an area in which it has finally caught up with, and now surpassed, Domino occurs in the area of "shared nothing" redundancy. IMHO, Lotus never marketed Domino Clusters, an area in which they held a huge advantage over Exchange, heavily enough.
In any case, Exchange 2010 has effectively abandoned backup/restore as a "disaster recovery" methodology in favor of on-line/multi-site/redundancy using directly connected IDE (SATA) disks in pace of directly connected SCSI disks or SANs with SNAP support.
I could be wrong, but Exchange 2010 may be the first major product in any domain to make this leap from SCSI disks to order of magnitude cheaper per bit IDE disks plus redundancy.
I have written about this further over at Ferris
Interesting point, Nick. Our resident Exchange experts over at Ed's may be a little bit quick to dismiss this release.
I wonder what the guys in Redmond think.
I can see how this version of Exchange catches up to Domino's "shared nothing" clusters (though the obvious point remains that Domino servers can be clustered against more widely disparate hardware because of Domino's multi-OS support). I don't see anything in there that *surpasses* Domino's clustering, though. Is there some detail that hasn't made it into the published articles that would explain that? It looks like the argument is that the availability of shared nothing clustering allows one to use Google-like cheap server hardware and avoid expensive SANs. I get that, but one can do the same thing with Domino (for several years now). Where's the advantage: Exchange coming from?
Caveat: I haven't managed an Exchange site since Exchange 2k, so I'm very far from an Exchange expert. I'm just reading the articles and trying to understand the feature set.
Whether it supports anyone's views or not, there is some fact in saying Domino's cluster ability has always surpassed that of Exchange.
There's little doubt that Exchange customers are going to get some new features they could use in this release. Good for them.
I do question the storage selling point though. SATA storage has been in use with various NAS/SAN devices for awhile now, many of them very affordable. Smaller systems are usually SATA, larger ones, SAS. The idea of backup to spinning disk isn't all that new either...so on this point I guess I don't see what MS is trying to say is revolutionary.
Volker, as to: "Our resident Exchange experts over at Ed's may be a little bit quick to dismiss this release." Just as similarly the Domino experts on various MS-centered blogs are all too quick to dismiss any Domino release as well.
