An interesting sponsored whitepaper dropped into my inbox a few days back regarding a Linux-based Corporate email server as an alternative mail system for certain types of user within an enterprise. In fact it can simply "drop-in" to a heavy Microsoft environment with ease and co-exist seamlessly, no disruptions or reconfiguration of any kind required.
The whitepaper screams a few interesting points as to why it is the alternative to Microsoft Exchange, for a giggle I thought I'd spend a couple of hours playing with it to familiarize myself in-case one of our customers was interested in it one day and wanted the other side of the sales story.
According to the whitepaper it would seem that Exchange is plagued with problems, inherent architecture flaws in some instances it would seem:
- Performance and backup issues with larger mailboxes
- Closed database architecture driving complexity around backup and high availability
- Inefficient storage I/O, driving archiving costs and challenges
- Limitations of the Web access client, with its pre-Web 2.0 UI and flimsy support for browsers other than Internet Explorer
- Inefficiencies for mobile device clients, especially BlackBerry users (via BES)
So, let's just take a peek through these issues and discuss a little these flaws in the world's most prevalent corporate messaging platform and see if we can't debunk a few myths.
Performance and backup issues with larger mailboxes, Closed Database Architecture and inefficient storage I/O driving costs and challenges.
These three are all pretty much the same and seemingly the foundation upon which PostPath makes it's case for using their solution rather than undertaking an expensive Exchange upgrade and migration.
As with all Exchange naysayers the bogeyman is yet again the JET database architecture. A deprecated technology screams the whitepaper which in effect requires an organization to go out and purchase expensive storage which in turn add's complexity to the backup and archiving solution and contributes to the performance of large mailboxes given the stress placed on the disk subsystem.
Interestingly enough the folks at PostPath seem to have missed that Microsoft themselves have given quite comprehensive guidance around amongst other things the performance of mailboxes in an Exchange 2007 environment. Seems that the cost of RAM is cheaper than the cost of storage up until about 32gb and was therefore a primary driver behind the switch to 64-bit computing in Exchange 2007.
Referring to the cost comparison on the PostPath website (I'll come to this later) a correctly sized mailbox environment for 2000 users, who are all relatively heavy mailbox users we would require 10gb+2gb RAM for the overhead. But in doing so we shift the majority of the I/O from the disk, to the RAM subsystem - which in most tests shows a reduction in disk I/O of around 70% from Exchange 2003 and therefore eliminate the need for all of that expensive storage we needed to account for.
Wow - did I read that right? A 70% reduction in disk I/O from the previous version of Exchange off the bat - not sure about everyone else, but I kind of like that kind of "shortcoming" in the product.
Limitations of the Web access client, with its pre-Web 2.0 UI and flimsy support for browsers other than Internet Explorer
Not sure I entirely agree on this one either, I kind of like the improvements in the OWA experience with Exchange 2007 afterall the purpose of the client is meant to be for those users who infrequently use mail or happen to be away from their primary client machine (in which case they would be using outlook right?)
Of course Web 2.0 interfaces are much prettier and AJAX is great right. However given one of the key features promoted by PostPath is the fact that their alternative works with Outlook just as well as Exchange (Yes, I'll ignore that guys) that would mean that all of our corporate users would not only need to be familiar with the featureset of Outlook when in the office, but then the rich Web 2.0 UI when out of the office or away from their primary PC.
Given OWA Premium is one of the most advanced AJAX applications on the planet some of their comments around AJAX later in the whitepaper confused me, along with the lack of "non-IE" browser support which if you look at OWA Light (which incidentally has quite a nice Web 2.0 feel about it) sort of disappears as well. In fact at last check OWA Light supported all of the major browser players - Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, mulitple versions of IE including IE on Mac. Obviously I haven't tested all of these but my experience on IE and Firefox was the same - if someone wants to mail me one of those super light Mac laptops I am happy to try Safari as well.
Inefficiencies for mobile device clients, especially BlackBerry users (via BES)
Interestingly the primary reason stated for inefficiencies with mobile devices was also the I/O overhead - given I've covered that fairly well earlier on I'll just ignore this one for brevities sake. Even if a BlackBerry is a little more resource intensive device, will be interesting to see what kind of performance hit the iPhone 2 has on our Exchange servers, I'm predicting a global meltdown myself.
I'll cover off the cost comparison from their website in my next post as it makes for some interesting reading as well.