In these trying times

Unless you're reading this from your tropical island fortress (which I hope at least one of my readers has), you are no doubt seeing the dismal news coming out of just about every world market.  Times are tough and money is tight.  Every job is on the line, every new project is being scrutinized and every penny pinched until Lincoln screams.  Not only here in America, but Europe, Asia and every other corner of the world; a recession is being felt, and felt hard with few exceptions to be found.  Literally, as I am writing this, major market indices are falling like a stone on yet another set of bad economic news.

Now, this is a blog about Exchange Server, so how does that relate?  Pretty easily.  Email systems have been one of the most effective solution sets for reducing enterprise costs year over year.  Exchange Server has had a role in that, without a doubt. By reducing the costs of telecommunication and postage dramatically since their introduction, email solutions like Exchange Server have made it possible to continually do more with less.  As Exchange has evolved, the impact on your bottom line it provides has also grown.  Office Communications Server, Live Meeting and Unified Communications Services have all allowed businesses to grow their reach and access to clients without putting additional physical office space into play.

So without a doubt, we must renew our commitment to using technology to extend budgets, cut waste and continue to streamline business processes for our end-users.  There are a few things that this means to the average Exchange Engineer, and they are critical to take into consideration.

1 - Can you make due with less?  Overloading and Exchange Server to attempt to squeeze more life out of existing hardware may be a near-sighted option in the long run.  Machines collapsing under the strain of too many users can result in countless hours of overtime pay and unproductive time, which will lose money instead of helping the business make it.  There are many great resources for finding out just how much you can squeeze out of any given Exchange Server.  MSExchange.org, for example, has a great series of article on sizing Exchange 2003 which starts here.

2 - Are you ignoring maintenance?  Keeping the servers up and running 24x7 without maintenance windows for routine upkeep is definitely the number one cause of server failure.  No one wants downtime, but your uptime numbers (such as the fabled 5 nines) are for tracking unexpected downtime - NOT maintenance!  Each month, Microsoft releases critical patches and hotfixes that cannot be ignored because corporate concerns do not want to allow the servers to be rebooted. Failure to patch will cause security holes, allow memory leaks to cause damage and open you up to a host of other problems, all of which impacts your servers's ability to continue functioning, and impacts your bottom line directly.  This may not be the best time to try to upgrade, but that only strengthens the need for proper maintenance windows to be scheduled and upheld.

3 - Get all the data protection that you can afford.  Downtime (unscheduled, non-maintenance downtime to be exact) is expensive.  Fixed costs like power, salaries, benefits, real estate costs, taxes and the like continue to build up while the people who generate revenue can't make money, so every minute you're offline when they need to be working is a minute you're losing money.  It's as simple as that.  The solution, however, is rarely that simple.  Not every organization can possibly afford extensive Disaster Recovery solution sets (see disclaimer below).  This does not, however, mean you can ignore the problem.  Whatever backup/recovery/failover tools you can afford should be in your arsenal to keep the servers up and running whenever business is going on. For many, this means making due with existing solution sets.  That's fine, as long as you can make those solutions meet the needs of the organization.  If you use tape backup, make sure you can back up the entire data-set within your backup window.  If you use replication technologies, make sure you're meeting your Recovery Point Objectives and truly protecting the data.  No matter what, test...test...TEST!

Times are tough, no one can doubt that these days.  Technology is nearly always a cost center that gets looked at harshly during points of budget pinches.  Sometimes new systems and technologies are still required to meet the needs of the organization, but you can give your company the benefit of a well-run Exchange Server system with minimal additional spending, as long as you remember to take a common-sense approach to what needs to be done and what cannot be ignored.