On prem Exchange hardware questions.
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@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
So far, we've done quite well.
This is the problem with all on prem solutions.... measuring it. The reality is you can deploy almost any solution, in almost any way, and run quite well, for quite some time. The small risk pool for analysis is terribly small so it is super easy to get lucky and have few, or even no, outages.
Compare it to using no RAID. Just a single hard drive, no backups. Sounds crazy, right? But now let's deploy servers this way. Let's say a dozen of them. Let's run for four years like this. Assuming no one drops a server or gets water on it... chances are quite likely that we will see zero data loss. None at all.
On one hand, we all know that the setup with no RAID and no backups is insanely risky. But if we do the analysis, we also know that someone using anecdotal evidence is likely to be able to say that data protection was 100%. Both things are true... it was observed to be totally reliable, and the risk is insanely high.
Things like O365 feel like they have way more downtime because the downtime is far more visible and nearly every customer experiences some, sometimes. But what isn't as visible is how often others have it, and how big their outages are.
It's like T1 vs. cable. Cable tends to fail a little all the time. T1s tend to fail dramatically, once in a great while. Overall, I've never seen any T1 come close to the worst cable in terms of reliability, yet everyone presents T1s as being super reliable. Why? Because they can select observation windows that are 100% up quite easily. It's easy to miss outages that can last days or even months. Yet, try to find a T1 customer that hasn't had an outage of more than a week, it's actually hard.
Now, of course, you can invest more, design a great environment, and potentially get on premises to be better in reliability than O365. It's not really all that hard. But the average on prem Exchange is not going to beat it, not over the long haul whether because of networking, software, bugs, or whatever. But likely any individual on prem outage will be less frequent, but longer in duration. That's just the nature of how these kinds of outages work.
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@dbeato said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
SSDs... yes, unless you have a special case with extreme amounts of storage (like 30+ TB) combined with little need for performance, you should just use SSD and never have spinners even on the table.
Read Intensive? Write Intensive? or Mixed use?
Write intensive, that is what Exchange does most of the time.
No, read intensive is what you want. It's Dell's description of the write endurance of the drive, not the workload per se.
Read intensive SSDs normally have about 1 DWPD for 5 years. DWPD is drive writes per day so if the drive is 480GB you can write 480GB of data each day for 5 years straight.
Put another way, you can write 876 TB of data to the drive during it's 5 year lifespan.
Mixed use is usually 3 DWPD and write intensive 5-10 DWPD.
A mail server will never need anything more than read intensive drives.
2 drives in RAID1 will do the job in this case - without breaking a sweat. -
@Dashrender said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Are SSDs overkill for Exchange?
SSDs aren't overkill for a desktop. Unless you've got an extreme edge case, spinning drives haven't had a place in servers in several years now.
I want to agree with this, but the prices are still kinda high for enterprise drives... you have to look at the financial aspect in my opinion... it's quite possible that SSDs will be the way to go.
I.e. HDD = RAID 10 or RAID 6 (min)
135 GB of Exchange data is nothing Two 500 GB HDDs in RAID 1 will get you there, but will it have the performance you want, not likely, but two SSDs in RAID 10 will.
But perhaps 4 or 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be 'good enough' and possibly less expensive than 2 SSDs? it's math plus requirements.
Enterprise 2.5" drives are not cheap either.
A 600GB 2.5" 10K drive is slightly more expensive than a 480GB enterprise SSD SATA drive. And the SSD will of course outperform the 10K drive easily.
If Dell has it the other way around they are trying to get rid of old stock or something.
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@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@Dashrender said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Are SSDs overkill for Exchange?
SSDs aren't overkill for a desktop. Unless you've got an extreme edge case, spinning drives haven't had a place in servers in several years now.
I want to agree with this, but the prices are still kinda high for enterprise drives... you have to look at the financial aspect in my opinion... it's quite possible that SSDs will be the way to go.
I.e. HDD = RAID 10 or RAID 6 (min)
135 GB of Exchange data is nothing Two 500 GB HDDs in RAID 1 will get you there, but will it have the performance you want, not likely, but two SSDs in RAID 10 will.
But perhaps 4 or 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be 'good enough' and possibly less expensive than 2 SSDs? it's math plus requirements.
Enterprise 2.5" drives are not cheap either.
A 600GB 2.5" 10K drive is slightly more expensive than a 480GB enterprise SSD SATA drive. And the SSD will of course outperform the 10K drive easily.
If Dell has it the other way around they are trying to get rid of old stock or something.
I haven't seen actual prices in a while... So I just have to accept what you're saying to be true.. the last time I saw SSD enterprise drives, they were still easily double the cost at the same capacity as HDD.
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is the client needing, thinking or looking to upgrade Office (if they use it)?
I had a client that had to move off an old on-prem exchange server (needed OS and h/w replacement), plus needed to upgrade Office.
I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.
They had an exchange db of about what you're looking at. Moving that to the cloud with the right tools was a breeze.
Just something to think about.
Another thing was to do with support. The client is based in a rural area and concern was raised as to whether adequately aware IT support staff would be available should MSX die, moving to O365 got rid of that problem.
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@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
during it's 5 year lifespan
Do SSD really have a 5 year lifespan? This is shorter than many companies keep their servers in production.
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Don't forget that Exchange needs a backup to be run regularly or it will fill the drive (see: circular logging).
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@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
during it's 5 year lifespan
Do SSD really have a 5 year lifespan? This is shorter than many companies keep their servers in production.
If you buy Dell or HP, you buy it to able to get support easily. If you go outside the warranty, well, then you're on your own. Servers have 5 year warranty max and so have the enterprise SSDs and HDDs. So yeah, the lifespan is 5 years but it might work for 20 years, who knows...
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@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
during it's 5 year lifespan
Do SSD really have a 5 year lifespan? This is shorter than many companies keep their servers in production.
If you buy Dell or HP, you buy it to able to get support easily. If you go outside the warranty, well, then you're on your own. Servers have 5 year warranty max and so have the enterprise SSDs and HDDs. So yeah, the lifespan is 5 years but it might work for 20 years, who knows...
Dell will let you buy 2 more years.
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@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
during it's 5 year lifespan
Do SSD really have a 5 year lifespan? This is shorter than many companies keep their servers in production.
No, they have an operational lifespan measured in transactions, not time. Most are decades or centuries.
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@siringo said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.
Exactly, it is a RARE shop that can make on prem cost less than cloud, even with O365 - unless the on prem is cutting a lot of corners, which can be perfectly acceptable depending on the business. At 100 users, that's $400/mo or $4800/year. Not very much considering what you get.
To do that on premises you need a moderate server, nothing crazy, but can't be some old junk just lying around. And to be anything like O365, you'd need at least two servers, not necessary in an HA cluster, but immediately available secondary hardware absolutely. So figure at least $6K for one server, $12K for the pair.
Now add licensing. That's Windows Server and Exchange licenses, then CALs and Exchange CALs. That's many thousands right there. That'll like take you to around $18K or more, and being on the skimpy side at this point.
Now we have to add HVAC and electrical costs for on prem, which isn't huge, but will be hundreds or thousands a year that people tend to overlook.
And now the IT costs. Running those servers, doing updates, supporting them when there is an outage. That stuff adds up, quickly. There's realistically no way that you can do this for under $500/mo and at some point you are getting a full time admin just for this and anyone qualified will be at least $90K a year in loaded costs! We'll ignore what you are "likely to need" and focus on the $500/mo which is $6K a year - just realistically no way to get below that with two Exchange servers, all of the associated infrastructure just for that, patches, updates, hardware, etc.
That puts it at $24K for that first year to have even a modicum of comparability to O365 and doesn't even begin to address things like enterprise hosting or redundant ISPs or anything like that. Figure you will pay that every five years, except the IT cost is annual. So add another 4 years at $6K and that's $30K over 5 years or $6K per year...
That makes it, ignoring all HVAC and electrical costs, real estate costs, ISP costs.... at least $1200/year more than O365 while getting quite a bit less in most cases. If you don't care about uptime or risks, you can shave a lot of costs off of that but only by not trying to match O365 in any way. Which is perfectly fine if that works for your business. But apples to apples, you might be able to match O365 somewhere north of 200 users, but only by taking on risks for trivial savings.
Now if you have thousands of users, of course, it's worth evaluating. But at thousands of users, MS will cut you some slack on the O365 price, too.
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@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Servers have 5 year warranty max
With Dell, you can always two additional years after the 5, for a total of 7.
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@JaredBusch said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Dell will let you buy 2 more years.
Sorry Jared, didn't see your post when I also responded to the 5 years....
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In my math above, I specifically didn't mention backups because that's a complex pricing question and most people feel (and rightfully so) that they need to provide third party backups for O365. So backups are potentially a wash.
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@JasGot said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@Pete-S said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Servers have 5 year warranty max
With Dell, you can always two additional years after the 5, for a total of 7.
I didn't know that you could extend both warranty and support with Dell beyond 5 years. But yes, economically it would be seven years then.
However drive manufacturers base the write endurance numbers on their own warranty which is 5 years for enterprise products. But it's easy to recalculate. 1 DWPD for 5 years is the same as 5/7 (~0.7) DWPD for 7 years.
With 480GB drives you still have ~330GB/day of write endurance every day.
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@scottalanmiller Backups of onprem Exchange can become insane. So yeah I agree with that.
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@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@siringo said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.
Exactly, it is a RARE shop that can make on prem cost less than cloud, even with O365 - unless the on prem is cutting a lot of corners, which can be perfectly acceptable depending on the business. At 100 users, that's $400/mo or $4800/year. Not very much considering what you get.
To do that on premises you need a moderate server, nothing crazy, but can't be some old junk just lying around. And to be anything like O365, you'd need at least two servers, not necessary in an HA cluster, but immediately available secondary hardware absolutely. So figure at least $6K for one server, $12K for the pair.
Now add licensing. That's Windows Server and Exchange licenses, then CALs and Exchange CALs. That's many thousands right there. That'll like take you to around $18K or more, and being on the skimpy side at this point.
Now we have to add HVAC and electrical costs for on prem, which isn't huge, but will be hundreds or thousands a year that people tend to overlook.
And now the IT costs. Running those servers, doing updates, supporting them when there is an outage. That stuff adds up, quickly. There's realistically no way that you can do this for under $500/mo and at some point you are getting a full time admin just for this and anyone qualified will be at least $90K a year in loaded costs! We'll ignore what you are "likely to need" and focus on the $500/mo which is $6K a year - just realistically no way to get below that with two Exchange servers, all of the associated infrastructure just for that, patches, updates, hardware, etc.
That puts it at $24K for that first year to have even a modicum of comparability to O365 and doesn't even begin to address things like enterprise hosting or redundant ISPs or anything like that. Figure you will pay that every five years, except the IT cost is annual. So add another 4 years at $6K and that's $30K over 5 years or $6K per year...
That makes it, ignoring all HVAC and electrical costs, real estate costs, ISP costs.... at least $1200/year more than O365 while getting quite a bit less in most cases. If you don't care about uptime or risks, you can shave a lot of costs off of that but only by not trying to match O365 in any way. Which is perfectly fine if that works for your business. But apples to apples, you might be able to match O365 somewhere north of 200 users, but only by taking on risks for trivial savings.
Now if you have thousands of users, of course, it's worth evaluating. But at thousands of users, MS will cut you some slack on the O365 price, too.
I'm confused...Didn't you just say a few posts ago that you agree that cloud is almost never cheaper? And now you say in this post that it's a rare shop that can make cloud cheaper than on-prem? I'm going through the same math and trying to decide which way to recommend for 75-80 users. We're pretty stuck with office due to how a couple of our teams use macros behind Excel for several things. Management folks would potentially like to take advantage of Teams and maybe SharePoint. So it may make sense. We already have all the hardware, hvac, ect. in place because we're already hosting multiple virtual host servers, so the infrastructure is good. We're also one of those places that hasn't had an Exchange outage (specific to the Exchange server) with our on-prem solution. We've had a couple extended power outages or Internet outages over the years, but nothing really to speak of. We've been on Exchange/Office 2010 until now because there's been really no compelling reason to change. The way it looks to me is at 75/80 users the costs over 6-7 years (if you keep your Exchange and Office suite that long) are then starting to equal out, and at that point you're probably looking to upgrade again with a large capital cost so it maybe makes sense to go Microsoft 365 and stay current, have access to Teams and Sharepoint, etc. But your statement on both sides of the aisle there (both on-prem and could almost always being cheaper) was kind of confusing to me.
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@Dragon3303 said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
I'm confused...Didn't you just say a few posts ago that you agree that cloud is almost never cheaper?
Almost 100% certain this is what he was assuming the reader would infer:
Cloud is not cheap when people just move an on-prem workload.
Services hosted on a cloud solution, though can easily be cheaper than anything on-prem. -
@Dragon3303 said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@siringo said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.
Exactly, it is a RARE shop that can make on prem cost less than cloud, even with O365 - unless the on prem is cutting a lot of corners, which can be perfectly acceptable depending on the business. At 100 users, that's $400/mo or $4800/year. Not very much considering what you get.
To do that on premises you need a moderate server, nothing crazy, but can't be some old junk just lying around. And to be anything like O365, you'd need at least two servers, not necessary in an HA cluster, but immediately available secondary hardware absolutely. So figure at least $6K for one server, $12K for the pair.
Now add licensing. That's Windows Server and Exchange licenses, then CALs and Exchange CALs. That's many thousands right there. That'll like take you to around $18K or more, and being on the skimpy side at this point.
Now we have to add HVAC and electrical costs for on prem, which isn't huge, but will be hundreds or thousands a year that people tend to overlook.
And now the IT costs. Running those servers, doing updates, supporting them when there is an outage. That stuff adds up, quickly. There's realistically no way that you can do this for under $500/mo and at some point you are getting a full time admin just for this and anyone qualified will be at least $90K a year in loaded costs! We'll ignore what you are "likely to need" and focus on the $500/mo which is $6K a year - just realistically no way to get below that with two Exchange servers, all of the associated infrastructure just for that, patches, updates, hardware, etc.
That puts it at $24K for that first year to have even a modicum of comparability to O365 and doesn't even begin to address things like enterprise hosting or redundant ISPs or anything like that. Figure you will pay that every five years, except the IT cost is annual. So add another 4 years at $6K and that's $30K over 5 years or $6K per year...
That makes it, ignoring all HVAC and electrical costs, real estate costs, ISP costs.... at least $1200/year more than O365 while getting quite a bit less in most cases. If you don't care about uptime or risks, you can shave a lot of costs off of that but only by not trying to match O365 in any way. Which is perfectly fine if that works for your business. But apples to apples, you might be able to match O365 somewhere north of 200 users, but only by taking on risks for trivial savings.
Now if you have thousands of users, of course, it's worth evaluating. But at thousands of users, MS will cut you some slack on the O365 price, too.
I'm confused...Didn't you just say a few posts ago that you agree that cloud is almost never cheaper? And now you say in this post that it's a rare shop that can make cloud cheaper than on-prem? I'm going through the same math and trying to decide which way to recommend for 75-80 users. We're pretty stuck with office due to how a couple of our teams use macros behind Excel for several things. Management folks would potentially like to take advantage of Teams and maybe SharePoint. So it may make sense. We already have all the hardware, hvac, ect. in place because we're already hosting multiple virtual host servers, so the infrastructure is good. We're also one of those places that hasn't had an Exchange outage (specific to the Exchange server) with our on-prem solution. We've had a couple extended power outages or Internet outages over the years, but nothing really to speak of. We've been on Exchange/Office 2010 until now because there's been really no compelling reason to change. The way it looks to me is at 75/80 users the costs over 6-7 years (if you keep your Exchange and Office suite that long) are then starting to equal out, and at that point you're probably looking to upgrade again with a large capital cost so it maybe makes sense to go Microsoft 365 and stay current, have access to Teams and Sharepoint, etc. But your statement on both sides of the aisle there (both on-prem and could almost always being cheaper) was kind of confusing to me.
I forked your question so that we can dig in.
It's complex, email is a commodity service so a service hosted on a cloud is going to be hard to beat because you are getting a small slice of a big pie. Running on prem means you have to spend more to get up to the minimum size in order to run it than the entire solution could cost.
When looking at IaaS, cloud almost never competes with on prem. When looking at SaaS, the opposite is true - because you are shifting all of the parts that matter rather than simple doing the same thing in two different places. With SaaS, we don't actually know if it is a cloud under the hood, for all we know O365 is doing Exchange on bare metal (they aren't, I'm just saying, we'd be unable to tell) - it's the SaaS that matters in that case.
What actually matters here isn't the cloud aspect at all, it's the hosted aspect. Third party hosting of a commodity service is all but unbeatable. Running cloud on your own premises here would solve nothing. That O365 is cloud and on prem Exchange is not is confusing because that's an artefact, not the core of what matters. It's hosted as a service, versus not hosted, and not a service.
