You may of seen us mention recently the increased amount of work we’ve been doing with the Liverpool Business Continuity Management Forum, LBCMF is one of the most effective City Council initiatives we’ve worked with here.

The forum pulls together businesses and expertise from across the region to provide help and advice on how business can build business continuance plans.

The great thing for us as an IT company, is that this puts IT into context as part of continuity plans, IT maybe important, even critical for most businesses however, it is by no means the only thing that needs to be considered. The forum outlines everything from where to setup a new office in the event of a catastrophic failure, to understanding a “grab bag” and what should be in it. Understanding the bigger picture of continuity and DR planning is key to developing an effective plan.

To now build on the great work these guys have already done, they are offering free training to Merseyside businesses to help them develop their own continuity plans. I would certainly strongly recommend you take a look at this, the information these guys can provide, could one day be critical to the survival of your business.

So here’s the offer….

FREE TRAINING FOR BUSINESSES

Liverpool Business Continuity Management Forum is offering FREE training for small/medium businesses and voluntary organisations throughout 2011.

The fledging forum has only been operating for twelve months but has already attracted over 180 members. The forum meets regularly to discuss hot topics and promote business resilience throughout the greater Liverpool area.

The training curriculum is primarily aimed towards companies who are new to the concept of business resilience, but is open to all organisations. The aim of the programme is to provide step-by-step guidance for businesses to develop their own contingency plans. The plans when written should enable companies to recover quickly from incidents ranging from small fires right up to terrorist attacks.

Experienced professionals from a diverse range of private and public sector backgrounds will lead the exciting free seminars.

An introduction to the three training events is to be held during Global Business Continuity Awareness Week on the 22nd March in Liverpool with the programme concluding in December with a prestigious awards evening. Companies who stay the course will receive trophies and certificates of professional development. If you are interested in attending the training events please contact BCM@liverpool.gov.uk for further information.

So drop them a note and see how Steve and the team at LBCMF can help your business.

One of the biggest issues people have approached us with over the last 18months has regarded their need for increased protection of their key data systems.

Enterprises are realising that these days their business is usually entirely dependent upon their critical data, when in the past IT was often just an adjunct to the business process. Given sufficient planning, the IT process can now function from pretty well anywhere and play a big part in your business continuity plan.

With this in mind, we thought it would make sense to offer a forum to share our experiences and present some of the solutions we have put in place to offer protection of critical business systems to a range of organisations.

Looking at how we have used technology from NetApp, Microsoft, Platespin (Novell) and VMware to name but a few, to help companies deliver a range of different solutions, from off site backup of data, to replicating entire infrastructures and giving them somewhere to house key staff, so they can access business systems in the event of a major failure.

So we have decided to run an event here at Gardner Systems on March 17th, to show how this mix of technologies, with  the addition of some cloud and hosted services, has offered a number of our clients a really flexibly way to ensure they protect both their critical data and importantly their business from all kinds of eventualities.

If it sounds like something you’d like to attend, then please click here and visit our events website to register.

Hope to see you there…

At the end of last year we entered into an agreement to deliver some IT presentations to members of the St Helen’s Chamber of commerce and on March 16th, we’ll be doing our first event with the Chamber on “The Future of IT”.

Here is the official release from the Chamber;

The future of IT – Gaining a competitive advantage

Throughout 2011 and probably well beyond, most companies will want to either reduce existing costs through better use of IT or will consider an entirely new IT process as long as it offers a new and promising income stream. Discover where the key industry players see major returns on IT investment taking place.

Benefits:

• Gain an insight into the way IT providers are shaping and delivering their solutions in 2011 and beyond
• Find out how key topics such as Cloud computing, Dynamic IT, Data Efficiency, Backup and recovery solutions, Unified communications and Virtualisation continue to evolve
• Give yourself a competitive edge by understanding what technologies will be relevant to your business and how IT can help you to continue to grow in challenging times

Lunch and refreshments will be provided

so expect lots of information on topics such as Office 365, Lync, NetApp, Systems Management, Automation, desktop solutions, data centre efficiency, control of data and any other hot topics that pass our way between now and then.

It’s a very exciting change for us, working closely with a Chamber like this, and congratulations to the Chamber for doing something new, if it sounds like something you think you could benefit from, visit the Chambers website by clicking here it would be great to see you there.

We’re lucky here at Gardner’s that we get to work with a whole range of interesting customers, who do a wide range of interesting things and LIPA fall right into that category.

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts opened in 1996 to forge a new approach to performing arts training. It was co-founded by our Lead Patron Sir Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone-Witty (LIPA’s Principal), and is housed in his old school, which underwent a multi-million pound renovation to transform it into a state-of-the-art performing arts higher education institution.

As high profile customers go for Gardner, we certainly don’t have one with a more famous patron!

So what’s that got to do with the title of this piece?…well to be fair nothing!…

However we started talking to LIPA mid 2010 regarding a resilience project for their production IT systems, they where interested in our ability to deliver some offsite and hosting solutions. What we found was a couple of interesting things, which has allowed us to deliver a solution, that not only addressed what they wanted to do, but also saved money and provided functionality that they may not otherwise of been able to achieve

LIPA as any good organisation would, had started looking at the benefits of consolidating their server infrastructure and had embarked on a process of virtualisation using VMware ESXi , they had consolidated the vast majority of their physical hosts down to three ESXi servers. However as is often the case, they had reached a stage where they knew that to continue to develop this, would need some major investment, in terms of Vsphere upgrades and SAN infrastructure, to allow them to deliver high availability, mobility and greater scalability to their core IT services.

When we first discussed this project with them, we looked at two solutions which we thought could deliver much greater value than what they had already looked at, as well as providing them with an option for a highly flexible approach to business continuity and disaster recovery.

So what did we suggest;

• Hyper-V and System Centre – because of the hugely Microsoft centric nature of their infrastructure and the lack of real need for some of the very clever high end Vsphere (don’t get me wrong this is in no way a slight on VMware’s capability – we have many happy VMware customers, but increasingly Hyper-V is fulfilling the need extremely well and often at a fraction of the cost) functionality we suggested that a mixture of Hyper-v and system centre would help to deliver the flexibility and resilience they desired, while saving them a good amount of money at the same time.

 

• NetApp storage – many of you will know that we supply NetApp storage here and have worked a long time with them, but this was another great example of how NetApp provide a solution, which in our opinion is second to none, for underpinning a virtualised dynamic IT infrastructure, the mixture of flexibility provided by the NetApp unified storage model and the efficient storage technologies included, with fast efficient snapshots, deduplication, thin provisioning and excellent application integration provide a great platform for a virtual infrastructure. Importantly for LIPA NetApp also deliver a simple model for easy IP based data replication, with the ability to replicate data to multiple locations, which helps provide the platform to fulfil phase two of this project and provide continuity and DR to the business.

The mix of these two solution sets have allowed us to provide LIPA with a robust solution that delivers exactly what they need, while in the mean time for LIPA, because we’ve been able to save them money in terms of software licencing, they could invest the money differently to give them an even better solution than they had planned for.

I mentioned this to our good friend over at Microsoft Matt McSpirit (if you want to learn about Microsoft’s virtualisation and management stack, Matt is definitely your man, check him out on his BLOG here… http://blogs.technet.com/b/mattmcspirit/) and he thought it was a good story…to the point where Microsoft thought it would make an interesting case study, so if you want a bit more detail on what we did and how it benefitted LIPA and find out what their IT manager Ben Faulkner thought, then check the Microsoft case study over at Microsoft.com by clicking here

So a pretty enjoyable project all in, for a really good team of people over at LIPA, great mix of technology and a solution that is working a treat, this was a tough to beat!

If you want to know more of the techie detail, feel free to drop me a line.

We don’t normally have guest bloggers on our site, but when we saw this piece that our friend over at Microsoft, Matt McSpirit had written, it was to good for us not to blatantly plagiarise!

We do a lot of work here with NetApp as a storage vendor and Microsoft as a solution vendor and over the last 18 months or so, we have seen the increased integration and development of NetApp’s value to the Microsoft virtualisation stack, we have seen some good success with our clients and have been involved in some excellent projects with them using these technologies.

However nice to see it backed by someone with Matt’s experience and someone who has no vested interest in NetApp storage above and beyond any other storage vendor, in fact in his role, he has to be agnostic.

Anyway enjoy the post… if you do want to know more about Matt or Microsoft’s virtualisation solutions then click here to check out his excellent BLOG

 

so here’s Matt’s BLOG, word for word…

I’ve been a big fan of NetApp technologies for ages, and I’ve worked closely with people like Steve Winfield, and Pete Mason, to produce a number of videos showcasing some of the collaborative work that’s gone on between Microsoft and NetApp, resulting in products like SnapManager for Hyper-V, SnapDrive 6.2 and more.  We’ve got some fantastic joint wins on the platform now too, at both small, and large customers, so it’s all good from that perspective.

I’m currently building out my team’s internal demo infrastructure, which currently consists of 1 Dell T605, with Hyper-V R2, and a number of System Center technologies virtualised on top, along with a cluster of 2 Dell R710’s, hooked up to a NetApp FAS3050c.  Now this FAS3050c isn’t the latest model, and it doesn’t have the most capacity in the world (my DS14 Disk shelf gives me around 570GB of usable space) but then it was kindly donated to me by NetApp, who were replacing some of their older kit, with newer kit for our Microsoft Technology Center, in Reading, UK.  The great thing for me is, I can still have the latest version of OnTap, it’ll work with the latest and greatest versions of SnapDrive, and SnapManager for Hyper-V, and it still gives me all the features I need, like the snapshotting, thin provisioning, and best of all, deduplication.  I’ll be honest with you right now.  I love dedupe.  I think it’s fantastically clever, streamlined, and because it’s at the block-level, rather than the file level, it’ll even dedupe stuff that you think, on the surface, has no chance of being deduped.  Crazy stuff.  Let me explain more.

Firstly, for those of you not sure what deduplication with NetApp is, and how it works, there’s a great explanation over at the Dr DeDupe blog.

As I said, my cluster environment is 2 Nodes, and to that cluster, I’m presenting 4 LUNs of storage, which in my NetApp environment, are in 4 separate Volumes.  You don’t have to do it like this, and who knows, maybe I’ll change it in the future, but right now, this is how it is:

As you can see, I’ve got a dedicated LUN for my witness disk, (I’m using Node and Disk Majority for my 2-node cluster), and 3 LUNs presented to the cluster, which have been selected to be Cluster Shared Volumes.  They aren’t huge, 100GB each for two of them, and a 25GB CSV that will hold the swap files of my key VMs (Each host only has 12GB RAM, so having 25GB for SWAP VHD’s is fine!)  You’ll see from the image above, that currently, I’m using around 51% of my CSV2.  It’s currently got a 40GB (ish) Fixed VHD with WS2008 R2 inside, but at the same time, CSV2 also has another Dynamic VHD, with Windows 7 x86 inside it, currently expanded to around 8GB.  Total consumption of that CSV is 51GB:

So, that means I’ll lose 51GB on my SAN, right?  Wrong!  We’re actually using a grand total of 17.5GB!

If we go over to NetApp System Manager, and take a look at this particular volume, you can see for yourself:

Just think about this for a minute.  Due to the fact that this is block-level deduplication, we can look inside the contents of the VHD files etc, and see where the blocks match, and deduplicate them, so in this case, we’ve saved a grand total of 37.62GB, which amounts to 60%.  Obviously Windows still thinks it’s using 51GB, even though, under the covers, the SAN hasn’t lost that space.  This is where Thin Provisioning starts to help, as you can make Windows think it has more storage available to it.

This use of deduplication hasn’t just been used on my CSV’s.  Oh no.  I’ve used it on the Witness disk, where, even though the whole volume is only 1GB, and the consumption was 50MB for the quorum information, deduplication still managed to save me 10mb, which is 20%.  What about my other savings?  Well, on my SCVMM Library, where I’m storing a couple of VHDs, but also some ISO files, I’ve saved a total of 15%, and on my actual backup store, being used by Data Protection Manager 2010, to protect Hyper-V and SQL so far, I’m saving just under 39GB, which equates to 58%.  These savings are real, and are enabling me to get even greater levels of consolidation on my SAN than I would have normally.  Brilliant stuff NetApp.

Now I just need to get ApplianceWatch PRO working…

The UK doesn’t have extreme weather normally and when we do, well we’re not great at coping with it…no doubt we’ve all seen the pictures of the country grinding to a halt (bit like the ducks on the Canal at the end of my road). As we move into 2010 nothing’s changed.. Heavy snowfall and lots of things stop working, however it happens so infrequently it’s almost impossible to plan for.

One thing that has changed has been how technology now allows business to continue to operate in lots of cases pretty much unhampered, amazing how many people can now simply “work from home”, so although it may be difficult for the UK to handle the big infrastructure things, such as transport for rare occurrences such as the snow we are currently getting, the technology available today makes it much easier for many businesses to deploy solutions that allow great flexibility for its staff to make work “an activity not a destination”. We’ve done that here and have been able to keep ticking over pretty easily regardless of whether our team are snowed in or in the office, so what are the technologies we’ve used and what could you use in your business.

· Broadband – one of the biggest changes to the IT world over the last 10 years has become the ubiquity of high speed broadband access, pretty much every home in the country and probably everyone in commuter belt country have access to speeds more than enough to operate your normal office apps.

· Mobile Broadband – a useful addition is the ability to get mobile broadband services, more limited that their landline equivalent, but the major conurbations have good wide ranging coverage.

· Wireless access – again the shift in attitude to use of laptops and wireless access around the house as well as public wireless/Internet access from Starbucks to McDonalds, means for many people that flicking open the laptop and it just connecting to the Internet is no longer “techie magic” and is just expected by everyone be they 7 or 70.

But how do these technologies allow business to continue and although we are talking about the effect of the snow, what we are actually talking about is a business continuity plan, that allows you to continue when access to your business has been affected by a major event…or 5 inches of snow!

So here’s what we have done with our systems to keep the business moving.

As a Microsoft partner, our business systems are based around their technology, so apologies if you don’t use Microsoft stuff, but of course there are other ways to do all of these, just the plus with most of the MS technology we use, is the functions are out of the box and included in the price, so no need for gateways or 3^rd party extra apps to deliver it.

One of the technology changes we have seen from Microsoft and other software companies as faster remote access has become the norm, is the realisation that applications have to take into account the new reality of how people work, that is flexibly and often remotely. Microsoft have responded to that, taking many applications and ensuring they work well over limited bandwidth. But not only technically they work, but more importantly that these work pretty much seamlessly for the users. That is one area we’ve seen a real good improvement, apps just working regardless of location.

· Email – with our Exchange Server we have used the excellent Outlook Anywhere facility that allows our Outlook clients to connect securely to Exchange, using encrypted ports and certificates to ensure security, the Outlook Client automatically connects based on whether local or remote and makes the decision for the user. The introduction of Outlook Cache mode also helps to enhance this experience, allowing users to continue working with Outlook data even without a connection the Exchange server.

· Outlook Web Access with secure document access – Outlook Web access was enhanced in Exchange 2007 not just to include a web email client, but also introduced document access, allowing users to connect to folders shares and SharePoint sites, directly from their OWA client, without the need for any other software. Lots of clients have loved this, some deploying Exchange 2007 just for this…and yes…still there in 2010.

· SharePoint – A great collaboration tool…and important in our day to day use, SharePoint can also be accessed securely from the Internet and allows document collaboration for our currently geographically spread staff! Also has the option to access it via Outlook and OWA.

· Outlook Mobile access – our staff armed with the Windows Phone and iPhones (as well as trialling some software which puts active sync on a Blackberry…allowing you to get email to it, without the need for unnecessary Blackberry costs and BES technical overhead!) have been able to pick up their email without the need to even access a laptop, great for those quick messages and triage of email.

That’s what we currently have used, but that’s not all, we are enhancing this, in 2010 by deploying some new Microsoft technology that has shipped in the Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 releases;

· Terminal Server remote App publishing – for some of our Apps that don’t work so well over slow links, Sage Accounts springs to mind, we’ve always been able to run this as a TS app…however the problem with that, is you end up logging on, getting a new desktop etc…remote app publishing will allow us to just publish SAGE as an app. That will still run in TS but to the user will look like a local desktop app… so the look and feel of been local…but the performance of been sat in the office. These can be securely web published, so still no need for VPN.

· Windows 7 Direct access – as we roll out Windows 7 to our users the new direct access feature will be implemented, similar to that discussed in Outlook anywhere, our users will be open their Windows 7 laptops and connect straight in to all internal resources (well those we allow) and access them, securely, again without separate VPN overhead and invisible to the users, true anywhere access to resources, going to be a feature that changes the way many people work!

· Office Communications Server – we are going to extend the use of our real time comms application to allow users presence, IM and voice so we can communicate easily irrelevant of geography.

The important thing with all of these is that they are all relatively easy to deploy, all as part of the applications and from the end user point of view pretty much seamless, with the user able to open their laptop, whether in the office or at home, wired or wireless and their software OS and Apps will make the decisions that allow them to connect to key business applications with the user just been able to concentrate on doing their work and not worrying about remote technologies.

And that’s key in any continuity solution, that users are quickly and easily able to access their key business apps, without needing to wait for the helpdesk or the technical team to speak to them because the continuity solution is convoluted and separate from the day to day running of the business.

That’s just an example of what we’ve done, that’s allowed us to keep moving regardless of the current bad weather.

Think it’s time to build a snowman!!!

This press release from NetApp really caught my attention, we’ve been working with Microsoft and NetApp jointly over the last 13-14 months or so on Hyper-V and how to have it work with and take advantage of some really clever NetApp technology, such as cloning, dedupe and application aware backups of the Hyper-V server.

NetApp and Microsoft Announce Three-Year Pact Spanning Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Storage Management

Strategic Alliance to Deliver Highly Efficient and Optimized IT Solutions to Enterprise Customers

Sunnyvale, Calif. and REDMOND, Wash.—Dec. 8, 2009— NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

Over that time as both Hyper-V has become more mature, culminating in the recent R2 release, and NetApp’s understanding of where Hyper-V sits and how it works, has brought increasing levels of integration and ability to take advantage of the key NetApp value technologies.

When you start to bolt on things like Microsoft’s System Centre, SnapManager for Hyper-V and AppWatchPro from NetApp, you really are getting into the realms of a fully “Dynamic Datacentre” type solution, providing a very efficient (no duplication either dedupe or cloning) and flexible solution (rapid provisioning, using cloning technology).

We are seeing many clients we speak to now, really starting to appreciate the value of this dynamic approach to IT, the ability to have complete flexibility to quickly scale up and scale back their infrastructure, to quickly and without service disruption, move machines not only across hosts in a datacentre, but across datacentres.

And yes, this is not unique to NetApp and Microsoft as NetApp deliver lots of this functionality with VMWare and some of the VMWare plug ins are more mature, however what this announcement says to me, is that when major vendors like NetApp are making this kind of commitment, they appreciate that Hyper-V is very much a player and when you tie into it the power of what you can achieve with System Centre in terms of managing and automating your datacentre, there is a real choice for people to make in terms of delivering Dynamic Datacentre facilities.

Looking forward to seeing what kinds of MS/NetApp developments we get…exciting times ahead!

if you want to see the rest of the NetApp announcement go check it out click here want to see how NetApp and Microsoft work well together, check out Matt McSpirit’s Hyper-V/NetApp BLOG posts and videos

 

Microsoft yesterday announced some new pricing for their excellent BPOS solution, for those who don’t know, Microsoft hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Comms Server and Live Meeting.

These price drops make a very attractive solution, even more so, driven by the market a little, but still some excellent unique point especially with Exchange, the ability to mix on premise and cloud exchange as far as I can see is unique to Microsoft’s offering, nothing forcing you all on premise or all “cloud” for quite a few people we’ve met with regarding “cloud” projects this is a big winner.

Couple of other things where announced a biggy been the increase in mailbox size from 5gb to 25gb, believe this brings it in line with what Google offer.

Also a couple of good new case studies.

you can check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/online/en-gb/about.mspx

Here’s the new prices

From 3 November 2009 the new price structure for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite is as follows: Offer Original List Price New UK Price BPO Standard Suite £10.04 £6.71 Exchange Online Standard £6.69 £3.35 SharePoint Online Standard £4.85 £3.52 Office Communications Online Standard £1.67 £1.34 Live Meeting Standard £3.01 £3.02

If this grabs you attention, why not give us a call here at Gardner’s to share some more detail with you.

On October the 13th we held a really interesting preview event for around 30 businesses on Exchange 2010, we were lucky to have with us Julian Datta from Microsoft as our key speaker, during the event I tried my best to get down some of the key technology messages presented… so hopefully I got them all here!

What does Exchange 2010 Look to address?

• Communications Overload – How can a new version of Exchange help people to better manage the ever increasing amount of information, how to help people find the right person, right time, right device.
• Globally Distributed Users – How to better manage larger and an evermore distributed base of uses.
• High Cost Of Communications – how to minimise the business costs of communications.
• security and compliance – How can Exchange help companies meet more stringent requirements around their use of Email.
• cloud integration – How can Exchange co-exist with the increasing array of “cloud” services.

 

Technically speaking

What are some of the technical consideration for Exchange 2010?

Can it be Virtualised ? – as you’d expect of any MS product, of course yes is the answer – as with Exchange 2007 however the Unified Messaging Role cannot be, due to the lack of tolerance for any latency.

Memory Requirements ?  – Pretty much the same as those for Exchange 2007, if you want to check in detail then visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346700(EXCHG.140).aspx

Disk Changes ? – Will cover this in a little more detail later, however there are some massive changes to the way disk access and usage has been re-engineered in Exchange 2010 – IOPS requirements are reportedly 70% lower than those in Exchange 2007, allowing the realistic use of S-ATA disks in bigger enterprise solutions with disk performance less important.

Server Roles ? – No change to the server roles from those in 2007 – however one key change, the Client Access Role now also handles the Outlook MAPI connection, these are no longer handled at the Mailbox server role.

Public Folders ? – Public folders still in and supported.

Moving the Exchange Database to SQL server ? – This has been a long term debate and source of rumour, however at the moment there are NO plans to move Exchange database to SQL server – technically no real benefits -  would also leave the Exchange product group to reliant on the SQL group.

Exchange 2010 its 3 pillars

Exchange 2010 has been built on (to coin a Microsoft phrase) 3 Pillars namely;

• Flexible and Reliable
• Anywhere Access
• Protection and Compliance

and these pillars are the fundamentals that Exchange and its feature set are focussed on, so what does this all mean?

Flexible and reliable

The criticality of email is for many organisations now fully recognised and is a key business system, so Exchange 2010 looks to build on the improvements first delivered in Exchange 2007, things like CCR have been taken and made an even more integral part of the 2010 design.

single platform for HA and DR

One of the biggest changes in Exchange 2010 is the complete re-architecture of the way the Exchange databases are deployed.

Historically databases where deployed in storage groups, with transaction logs, these databases could not be natively shipped between servers. Exchange 2007 changed this with the introduction of continuous replication technology, LCR/CCR/SCR this log shipping technology allowed for secondary copies of the Exchange database.

This technique has been taken and supercharged with the introduction of database availability groups (DAG’s) These groups can be spread across upto 16 servers with each server hosting a replica of the production database. In the event of a server failure, the Exchange infrastructure will automatically redirect all client connections to the new “live” server.

Importantly this is seamless to the user and is part of the single platform delivery, with no requirement to worry separately about clustering, Exchange 2010 just delivers this for you.

Another important change is that the Hub and CAS roles can now sit on a HA mailbox server (unlike in 2007 where these roles HAD to be separate) this means that high availability can now be carried out on a minimum of 2 servers, allowing for HA to be made even more affordable in Exchange 2010.

Client Access Server Role

A key component in delivering the HA model, is something that on the face of it seems a basic change. Again historically Outlook (MAPI) clients have always connected directly to the Exchange Mailbox server (or back end server in Exchange 2003), with other clients such as OWA and ActiveSync connecting to the CAS server (or front end in Exchange 2003). a key component to the flexibility of DAG’s is removing the MAPI connectivity from the mailbox servers and rerouting it to the CAS servers, because of this, this allows the databases to move between mailbox servers and for mailbox servers to fail, while the CAS role seamlessly redirects the client to the Live Mailbox.

 

Storage Options

As disk sizes continue to grow, so do users mailboxes, historically Exchange has been very reliant on disk performance to continue to operate in a effective way, however this made it difficult for to take advantage of higher capacity, yet slower performing disk technologies such as S-ATA.

Exchange 2010 has reduced the I/O requirement to disk by around another 70% on top of an already substantial drop seen in Exchange 2007, these further drops allow S-ATA disks to become a realistic deployment option for Exchange.

DAG’s also allow for a less resilient disk technology to be adopted should users feel that they want to deploy on single disk one 1TB S-ATA disk as opposed to using a RAID array!

so because of these changes, this allows users again to potentially see a huge saving in implementation costs of an Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

Anywhere Access

A lot of the changes discussed so far are at an infrastructure level, however some really nice feature additions for the end user client as well. More work has been done to allow users to have Outlook as a single point of all communications – including things like text messaging now been consolidated into Outlook.

some of the following things will only be available in Outlook 2010, however will all also be in OWA, allowing earlier adopters of Exchange to have those features ahead of the appearance of Outlook 2010.

conversation view

really clever feature, came from some work that was developed from the office labs team. Allows all messages that follow a single thread to be grouped in a “conversation view”. Tools like clean up and ignore a conversation thread can certainly help control your mailbox.

voice mail with text preview

one of the additions to the UM functionality is the speech to text conversion from voicemail. The voicemail will sit in your Inbox, Exchange will then do a conversion to text and this will then be displayed in the mail body with the attached VM, it also includes the playback feature, which will allow you to highlight a piece of text and then just play that bit back from the voicemail.

Mail Tips

Mail tips will prewarn you of a users mail status before you click send, for example you want to send an email to Bill but Bill is OOF, then the mailtip will pop up on the Outlook pain to show his OOF status. You can then decide as to whether you click send or not.

 

OWA facilities

In what has become a theme for Exchange releases, the functionality of OWA increases again and no exception with 2010. The “premium” experience will now not just be a IE experience, with Firefox and Safari fully supported.

Another nice touch is all emails in a single pane now, rather than the first 25 on page1, now a scroll bar just like with the full client.

Protection and Compliance

Some nice features here, alongside some that may need the addition of service pack 1 to become fully formed features especially for the enterprise.

The addition of the archive engine is a really useful feature for smaller organisations and those that have no archiving already, if you’ve already invested in an enterprise archiving solution, you are probably not going to throw that away right now, however if you have nothing else in place, archiving can be hugely useful.

The Archive engine currently archives at a mailbox database level, however does NOT pull emails out of the existing mailbox store, they are all kept in the same store, which in the initial release, removes its usefulness as a way of managing mail store size, however what it does add is a whole lot of very useful functionality around compliance.

here’s a quick list of features that it brings;

• removing the reliance for PST – been able to remove the threats that PST files bring to the integrity of a corporate email system, as PST’s allow for both data loss from an organisation and also removes the enterprise admin control over email.
• global archive/compliance search – the ability to search for message threads and content across the entire organisation in the event of needing to meet a compliance mail retrieval request. this will also search archives and deleted emails in association with the correctly defined compliance and retention rules.
• Message archiving now allows archived messages to be seen in OWA, if users use archive PST, then these are no longer available to web client sessions.
• Protection – ability to define protection rules across your Exchange organisation.
  • rule classification – ability to assign global rights management rules at an Exchange level, rather than relying on users implementing them
  • legal hold policy – define policies around retention and the tracking of  changes and deletion of emails
• retention policy – the ability to set mail retention policies

Step in the right direction in terms of compliance rules. However the archive only archiving messages within the same mailbox database, means it doesn’t meet the needs of many archive users, to manage their mailbox database size. The suggestion is this will come with SP1. At the moment looks as though the archiving  is there more to drive the compliance features, rather than as an enterprise archive solution.

Optimised for software and services

One of the most talked about topics in the IT industry at the minute is that of cloud services, this is a huge strategic direction for Microsoft with their own expanding cloud offerings, from online versions of Exchange/SharePoint and OCS…via Azure all the way to Xbox live, Microsoft have a large range of cloud offerings.

Exchange 2010 plays right along with that and is engineered with it in mind, with much closer integration for, what is pretty unique to Microsoft’s view of the cloud world, the mix of on-premise and cloud.

What looks likely to be coming is the ability to manage your online and on-premise exchange via a single console, looking forward to seeing that.

You get full GAL integration shared free/busy information etc…making it a pretty seamless experience. This is a huge differentiator for Microsoft in our opinion, as the likes of Google for example, can’t give you that mixed and integrated solution, preferring the all or nothing approach, which can be off putting for many businesses.

Summary

Appreciate that this is a pretty high level overview, but just wanted to try and share the key points that Julian covered in around 2 1/2 hours.

If you want my information, of course we have Exchange 2010 available in our labs here for you if you want to contact us at microsoft@gardnersystems.co.uk and more than happy to arrange demo labs where appropriate.

 

Of course plenty of stuff on both the general Microsoft web site – http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/default.aspx

and the Exchange team BLOG is always worth a read… http://msexchangeteam.com/

As one of attendees said to me last week… the best version of Exchange by a long way! – high praise indeed!

During our Windows 7 and Server 2008R2 day with Matt McSpirit, he covered some excellent features in both Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, after my previous post about the neat stuff in 7, here’s some of the things in server 2008R2 that really grabbed our attention on the day.

Boot from VHD

Love this feature, real clever, this allows you to boot your Windows server from a VHD image, so your virtual image actually boots on the physical tin. think it through, means if you ever decide you want your virtual machine on tin, then just boot away, plus you only have to have one server image, regardless of it been deployed on hardware or virtually. just how clever is that!

Core Parking

Liked this little feature to. allows Windows to be clever enough to know, that if its not using some of the processor cores then it can let them go to sleep. has the potential to save power and costs, not earth shattering amounts, but to coin a well known supermarket phrase, every little helps and as servers with increasing amounts of cores are common place, if you can use them more effectively, this can only be a good thing.

Remote Desktop Services

This is a mix of enhancements (and rebranding of terminal services) to the standard terminal services, as well as the addition of native Virtual Desktop functionality.

with improved user experience, allowing virtualised presentation of video and audio through to the client device.

the addition of a connection broker allowing for virtual desktop delivery straight from hyper-v, with no need for a bolt on application to make it work.

massive all around functionality improvements check out here for more enhancements http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-virtualization.aspx

Hyper-V R2

Lots of the excitement around R2 are the enhancements to Hyper-V and especially the functionality that is also available in the freebie Hyper-V R2 Server.

The addition of Live Migration for those who want to move virtual workloads between servers without down time.

addition of the cluster shared volume, allowing multiple VM’s to sit on a volume, but having control over which server in the cluster mounts any VM, as all servers can truly share the volume.

Redirected I/O this is real neat as well, with the ability for hyper-v to add extra resilience by making its own intelligent calls on how to route traffic in the event of a component failure.

For much more on hyper-v http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-overview.aspx

 

Better together

as with the earlier BLOG there’s lots of stuff in there that when you throw Windows 7 into the mix, you add even more value, Direct Access, Branch Cache, RDP v 7, all add lots of value and business benefits.

What I really like about Microsoft’s recent software releases is that there has been lots of thought into adding benefits and value, looking at user problems and coming up with ways to fix them that are ingenious and innovative.

these releases of Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 carry that on in my opinion.

check out Microsoft’s sites if you want to try this stuff yourself the RC’s are still there for download.

Technet and VL customers will have the releases over the next few weeks.