On prem Exchange hardware questions.
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@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Our on-premises solutions are 100% up-time with the exception of one due to environmental issues.
No one is 100% uptime. All systems are 100% uptime in between outages. You might beat O365 in uptime, that's relatively easy to do, but you can't get to 100% uptime.
What I mean is.... I had a system that went just a few weeks short of ten years, zero downtime. It was as reliable as you could reasonably get. We decommissioned it without ever experiencing an outage. We had "observed 100% uptime", yes. But the system wasn't a 100% uptime system, we just got lucky that we had operated it successfully during an uptime window and shut it down before the downtime hit. But if we ran it again, our risk isn't zero. Maybe close to zero, definitely really low, but not zero.
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@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
EDIT: Which was great because we weren't being hit by a bus load of calls when O365/M365 went down.
Sure, but that's like driving without a seatbelt in one car, and having someone in another car with a seatbelt. Then saying "ha, by being in the car without a seatbelt, we weren't hurt when the other car had an accident." It sounds like you are doing something safer, but you aren't, it's just presented in an emotionally misleading way.
The real advantage to lost of on-prem hosted systems is that outages tend to be temporally isolated - each outage has no connection to another. So you don't get swamped with outage calls all at once, even though your overall downtime is likely many, many times higher and requires way more engineering effort.
Supporting both, I know the difference is huge. On prem outages means we have to dedicate engineering time, generally billable, and do all kinds of customer management. O365 outages our service center can just point customers to the DownDetector page and explain that the service is down until MS corrects it. Even with loads of O365 customers calling in at once, it's less effort to deal with 100 customers on O365 during an outage than one on prem that we have to actually fix.
Again, on prem makes lots of sense at the right times. Just saying that presenting the recent outage as if it would affect the decision of any logical IT shop doing its evaluation properly is misleading. It's an emotional plea, but someone using proper risk assessment would understand that it's just part of any system and the fact that it was recent is not relevant and doesn't affect future risk assessment.
Not going down this road with you again Scott.
TTFN
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@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
Exchange via SPLA is a dollar or two a month per SAL. Cheap like Borscht.
That's the licensing cost. That doesn't include the Windows cost, the hardware cost, the IT costs... that stuff all adds up. I'm not saying that on premises never makes sense, just that you have to compare apples to apples.
We won a competition against cloud. Our solution set all-in was less than the O365 competition.
Cloud is never cheaper.
I agree that cloud is almost never cheaper, but that's dependent on the specific cloud and products. In a situation like this, both sides are primarily just a determination by Microsoft as to how much either will cost and the cost of the cloud solution and the cost of the on prem aren't artefacts of cloud or on prem, but rather artefacts of the pricing model.
I know lots of on prem that is way more expensive than cloud. Like dramatically so. Now, your argument is that it shouldn't be because they are doing it wrong. Sure, and that's valid. But you can't always make the same argument about the cloud side, too, that it costs too much only because you are picking the wrong one.
In your pricing case, you are providing a flat price that includes everything with power, HVAC, all support, licensing, hardware, software, virtualization, backups, etc. and coming out below $4/mailbox for the installation over time?
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@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
@PhlipElder said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:
EDIT: Which was great because we weren't being hit by a bus load of calls when O365/M365 went down.
Sure, but that's like driving without a seatbelt in one car, and having someone in another car with a seatbelt. Then saying "ha, by being in the car without a seatbelt, we weren't hurt when the other car had an accident." It sounds like you are doing something safer, but you aren't, it's just presented in an emotionally misleading way.
The real advantage to lost of on-prem hosted systems is that outages tend to be temporally isolated - each outage has no connection to another. So you don't get swamped with outage calls all at once, even though your overall downtime is likely many, many times higher and requires way more engineering effort.
Supporting both, I know the difference is huge. On prem outages means we have to dedicate engineering time, generally billable, and do all kinds of customer management. O365 outages our service center can just point customers to the DownDetector page and explain that the service is down until MS corrects it. Even with loads of O365 customers calling in at once, it's less effort to deal with 100 customers on O365 during an outage than one on prem that we have to actually fix.
Again, on prem makes lots of sense at the right times. Just saying that presenting the recent outage as if it would affect the decision of any logical IT shop doing its evaluation properly is misleading. It's an emotional plea, but someone using proper risk assessment would understand that it's just part of any system and the fact that it was recent is not relevant and doesn't affect future risk assessment.
Not going down this road with you again Scott.
TTFN
You went down the road of making the statement. We can't let an emotional plea go as if it was a true statement. You can't decide not to go down the road, you are the one that went down it and force us to have to explain to readers why it's an emotional plea. Don't make emotional pleas if you don't want us pointing them out.
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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.
