Welcome to Idea Exchange. Idea Exchange is a monthly forum in which Exchange Server experts share ideas and information with IT professionals. This month, Idea Exchange focuses on the relationship between the benchmarking and performance of messaging and collaboration software. Performance is one of the first things prospective customers ask about. We talked with David Howell and Perry Clarke, who led us through the labyrinth of testing standards used to measure messaging and collaboration systems and define which data is crucial in determining actual performance.
High performance can actually lower a company's cost of ownership.
For example, Exchange Server 5.5 lets you consolidate users onto fewer servers, reducing the cost of ownership through reduced hardware and software costs. With careful attention to system resource utilization, Exchange provides the headroom that an organization needs as it grows or as the behavior of its users changes. Consolidating servers also saves in the cost of maintenance. The cost of hardware and server software may be pretty expensive, but it's still a relatively small part of the picture compared to management. The amount of man hours spent managing deployment is critical, and that usually translates into numbers of boxes.