TPOV

During Interact, I asked Scott Schnoll, former MVP and currently a Blue Badge at the Technical Writing Team on Exchange, about the DAG in Exchange 2010.

Don’t get me wrong; I think it is by far the most elegant HA solution has offered so far and everyone should at least look at it!

But I made the point that it requires two Windows Server 2008 machines, running the Enterprise version of Windows. (The Standard Edition of Exchange will suffice.) For smaller companies that don’t neccessarily require HA, but want some kind of redundance, this might pose a problem.

A Standard edition of Windows sells for a SRP of $1,029. The Enterprise equivalent sells for SRP $3,999. Due to the fact that you will require 2 of these, you are either looking at $2.058 for two Standard Editions or a whopping $7,998 for two Enterprise licenses.

Scott pointed out that for that money you get true HA, where as LCR in Exchange 2007 only gives you another copy of the data. Yet, for the vast majority of small companies I have seen so far, thier primary concern is losing data due to a corrupt store, not so much the HA part of the story.

The pro’s of having an Exchange 2010 HA deployed (and Microsoft tells you will need at least 3 machines for a true HA solution) is of course that you can use cheaper SATA disks in a JBOD configuration.

But I’d say; why not have LCR still in place for these smaller companies? They could buy two servers, equipped with RAID 10 or something and still save some money… right?

Am I missing the point here? Is the Enterprise offering with the Exchange HA solution really that awesome, even for those companies that grow just beyond that SBS point?

Tino