After seeing the sales pitch a while back, I spent an hour or so this afternoon looking under the covers of the HP E5000 messaging appliances. These are part of the HP/ Microsoft Frontline partnership, where the two organisations have invested $250m on working together. The premise of a drop-in appliance which runs Exchange, sized by mailbox number and size, is a strong one I think – especially with a lot of organisations still on Exchange 2003 – 74% apparently!
Does anyone remember the old HP DL380 packaged cluster that was available up to maybe 4-5 years ago? I used to love those things… Great for SQL, Exchange, TS clusters. Well, the E5000 is basically a modern version of that. Two blades and a chunk of shared storage, in a custom enclosure. The ‘secret sauce’ is a wizard-driven interface which enables you to set up Exchange considerably quicker. Needless to say you still need to migrate the mailboxes, but if you are an IT team needing to get Exchange 2010 up and running, this may just help you out. With the fact that Exchange 2010 is tuned for local rather than SAN storage, and requires less in the way of IOPS, you are not taking up expensive space on your SAN….
Whilst the major benefit in my mind is the speed of deployment, it’s also space and power efficient, being based on blades. I reckon it will cut down on consultancy costs as well if you don’t have any Exchange experts on staff.
I’ve got some links to further information coming over shortly and I will add those then.
Sam Routledge's Blog 
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