Hi all, People always say that exchange 2010 save more money when comparing exchange 2003. But, you need more servers with powerful CPU and memory. (CAS array and DAG members) With exchange 2003, I can purchse the server with 4GB memory. I do not see the money saved. Can anyone help me out? Thank you.

John, I'm not disagreeing with you at all because in some respects I agree with you. And, I don't want to give you the "Microsoft" party line on things. A lot of this has to do with how many Exchange users you are supporting. From a software vendor's perspective, they are under continual demands for new features, functions, benefits. They are also pressed to maintain supportability of their products. How much more would support cost if Microsoft were still supporting Windows 3.1? I moved a customers server from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010 recently. They were using a Dell 2950 with 4GB of memory. The server supports about 900 mailboxes with a concurrency rate of about 35% (usally around 300 active/connected users). They had no high availability and only RAID 5 disks for fault tolerance. I moved them to an indentical server (Dell 2950 with 4GB of RAM) and they are operating just fine. No DAGs, no CAS arrays, etc... Where E2K7 or E2K10 can start to save you money is on organizations that are supporting 1000+ user accounts and you want better HA. I have another E2K3 customer with about 10,000 user accounts on a 4-node A/A/A/P cluster. Their concurrency from about 8AM to 5PM is around 80% and most of the users are pretty heavy e-mail users. They have 2 FE servers, 2 BH servers, and a 4 node cluster. The cluster nodes are all connected to a massive EMC SAN. The SAN had to be designed to support nearly 12,000 IOPS (I/Os per second). Trust me, that is a lot of disks. A lot more space and hardware than they really needed. Their design is going to move them to 2 DAGs (4 servers total each with 32GB of RAM), plus 2 CA and 2 HT servers (16GB of RAM each). The total number of servers is the same, but the "HA" story is much better. Also, the cost per GB is about 1/4th of what the old system was. I have another customer with about 700 users on E2K7. They have a CCR cluster and 2 HT/CA combined servers. We are reusing the existing mailbox servers and are going to create a 2 node DAG that includes the HT and CA servers. In that case, they are going from 4 servers to 2. Anyway, I'm rambling. You get the idea. The answer is "it depends." :-) Jim McBee - Blog - http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com

I believe it's currently attributed to the HA and not having to purchase a SAN to meet performance specs. But Jim is right, it depends.Mark Morowczynski|MCT| MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:EMA 2K7,EDA Win 7,ES,SA,EA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

Agree with Jim about the depends, I just provide some “Microsoft” reference J Exchange 2010: Saving Money, Delighting Users, Protecting Communications Save a fortune on storage with Exchange 2010James Luo TechNet Subscriber Support (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ms788697.aspx) If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com