Exchange server Implemenetation Analysis
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@Dashrender said:
Scott's not wrong here - I know several of the large Exchange installs around town seem to have more outages than I hear about O365 having (or at least used to a few years ago - I haven't heard lately).
Something I've noticed a lot, and I'm assuming that it is true, is that large environments tend to have more, smaller outages and smaller environments have fewer, bigger ones. So in a Fortune 100, I expect to see email blips of minutes or maybe hours every year or two, much like with Office 365. With an SMB it tends to be five to ten years of nothing then an epic outage of many hours or a day or two.
Much like consumer lines (huge volume) vs. leased lines (tiny volume.) Leased lines feel very reliable because you often go a decade without losing a packet. But then getting an outage of a week or even a month is common enough that I know first hand many places going into the months for a leased line outage. But generally only after many, many years of nothing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I'm not aware of any "just Exchange" plan from Office 365 that is available in any price except $4. There is nothing cheaper and nothing more expensive. I don't believe that there is any other plan for Exchange. Everything at a higher price point is part of a bundle.
I followed your link and sure enough that's that (not that I doubted you). But when you search the default O365 pricing page, this is not an option.
I'm assuming this $4/month is email and email only - i.e. no sharepoint/ODfB, etc? Granted for an extra $1/month, that stuff is totally a great value!
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@Dashrender said:
I mentioned that we are getting filtering at $1 a month, perhaps a bit more (I think I'm currently paying $55/month for 50 users).
You can find it cheaper and I think the trend is that those prices are dropping due to the pressure from the hosting firms. But even at $1, that's another 25% off of the hosted Exchange price.
You were comparing Exchange hosted at $5 to on premises. But the real price is $4. And then you are paying $1.10 for filtering. So the hosting price is down to $2.90 premium for you.
So when comparing, all of the licensing, effort, backups, storage, lost opportunity, etc. has to be compared against $2.90, not $5. That's a big difference.
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@scottalanmiller said:
My experience in large enterprises throwing huge money at on premises Exchange has had even more outages, though. I just don't mention those. O365 has very visible, talked about outages. On premises no one mentions to other people, but it goes down all the time. Even in the Fortune 10 where there is so much money and 24x7 staff thrown at the problem, they go down more often than the big hosting providers.
Sometimes the more staff you throw at something the less reliable it becomes. As a lazy sys admin, my hands-off, don't tinker approach may have improved our reliability. I dunno, I can only talk about my own experiences. You may well be right in that I'm at risk of a large outage that wouldn't happen with O365, and that lots of smaller outages are better than a few large outages.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I'm not aware of any "just Exchange" plan from Office 365 that is available in any price except $4. There is nothing cheaper and nothing more expensive. I don't believe that there is any other plan for Exchange. Everything at a higher price point is part of a bundle.
I followed your link and sure enough that's that (not that I doubted you). But when you search the default O365 pricing page, this is not an option.
I'm assuming this $4/month is email and email only - i.e. no sharepoint/ODfB, etc? Granted for an extra $1/month, that stuff is totally a great value!
Correct, it's the price of Exchange, not of a bundle. Few people get it because there is so much value in the bundles, but it's the comparison cost when considering if hosted email is worth it on a pure email basis.
All I did was Google "Office 365 Hosted Exchange" and it was the first hit. No idea why it isn't front and center on the Office 365 pages, but as Google Apps doesn't even offer pure email hosting, maybe that's just not a big seller.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
You may well be right in that I'm at risk of a large outage that wouldn't happen with O365, and that lots of smaller outages are better than a few large outages.
That maybe be better for large companies, but SMBs can often handle the large outages that Scott's talking about. Granted much more than 1 day and you start seriously affecting the business though.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
My experience in large enterprises throwing huge money at on premises Exchange has had even more outages, though. I just don't mention those. O365 has very visible, talked about outages. On premises no one mentions to other people, but it goes down all the time. Even in the Fortune 10 where there is so much money and 24x7 staff thrown at the problem, they go down more often than the big hosting providers.
Sometimes the more staff you throw at something the less reliable it becomes. As a lazy sys admin, my hands-off, don't tinker approach may have improved our reliability. I dunno, I can only talk about my own experiences. You may well be right in that I'm at risk of a large outage that wouldn't happen with O365, and that lots of smaller outages are better than a few large outages.
I think it is less than that they are tinkering and more than their infrastructure is more complex. You probably only have one or two email servers. Places where I have been have hundreds of them. They constantly need to have hardware maintenance, patches applies, clustering managed, capacity planning done, etc. And they are attacked much more often. Once you add clustering, especially on a big scale, you get lots and lots of issues. But it is pretty hard to avoid in a massive environment, even if only for handling the capacity.
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I'm on the O365 Plans & Pricing page. They definitely do not provide a link to Hosted Exchange anywhere. So odd, this was the plan that built their service.
I think that a lot of it is probably that Hosted Exchange is effectively a loss leader and not where they are making any money.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So when comparing, all of the licensing, effort, backups, storage, lost opportunity, etc. has to be compared against $2.90, not $5. That's a big difference.
I'll give you that - a straight up apples to apple comparison (though I'd argue that the average SMB is not aware of the $4 version, and only aware of the $5+ version because MS has the email only option pretty well buried).
I assume by lost opportunity you mean the inability to use the cash you spend on locally hosted exchange that could have been spent on other opportunities that might arise?
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@Dashrender said:
I'll give you that - a straight up apples to apple comparison (though I'd argue that the average SMB is not aware of the $4 version, and only aware of the $5+ version because MS has the email only option pretty well buried).
That this price is buried is brand new. New enough that I would be surprised how many people know that it is missing. The $4 price was so prominent for the first four years or whatever of Office 365 that I assume that Microsoft just assumes that everyone knows to look for Hosted Exchange and it will pop up. It's talked about in the SMB so often (larger businesses probably don't consider the pure email option very often) that maybe they feel that pushing it will hurt their other stuff? I know that it is listed as the price on SW regularly.
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I know I'm late to the party.
I don't think I've ever had a complete Office 365 outage. I've had occasions where a few users couldn't log in or receive email.... but never an occasion where we were completely unable to access our email.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I'm on the O365 Plans & Pricing page. They definitely do not provide a link to Hosted Exchange anywhere. So odd, this was the plan that built their service.
I think that a lot of it is probably that Hosted Exchange is effectively a loss leader and not where they are making any money.
This was my whole point - effectively Hosted Exchange costs $5/user/month, even though they do offer another plan - it's not easily accessible by the masses because the masses will search for O365, not Hosted Exchange.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'll give you that - a straight up apples to apple comparison (though I'd argue that the average SMB is not aware of the $4 version, and only aware of the $5+ version because MS has the email only option pretty well buried).
That this price is buried is brand new. New enough that I would be surprised how many people know that it is missing. The $4 price was so prominent for the first four years or whatever of Office 365 that I assume that Microsoft just assumes that everyone knows to look for Hosted Exchange and it will pop up. It's talked about in the SMB so often (larger businesses probably don't consider the pure email option very often) that maybe they feel that pushing it will hurt their other stuff? I know that it is listed as the price on SW regularly.
The $4/month/user price is how I originally convinced my management to get into Office 365... it wasn't until we had been on email for a year that I convinced them to do the Office 365 subscription for Office as well.
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@Dashrender said:
I assume by lost opportunity you mean the inability to use the cash you spend on locally hosted exchange that could have been spent on other opportunities that might arise?
That's one aspect. There are many, some examples:
- The time spent managing the on premises and the time learning Exchange could be used to do other things in IT.
- The move from Capex to Opex has value (dollar for dollar, of course.)
- Corners will inevitably be cut. Very commonly taking infrequent backups, not testing backups, not giving 50GB of storage to each mailbox user - which sounds trivial but typically results in lots of lost IT and business time in unnecessary email management, HR discussions, etc. SMBs spend a lot of time and effort, typically, trying to reign in a cost that effectively does not exist if they were not running on premises. That cost, either in providing that amount of storage and/or in dealing with curtailing email storage usage is very real but hard to measure.
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@Dashrender said:
This was my whole point - effectively Hosted Exchange costs $5/user/month, even though they do offer another plan - it's not easily accessible by the masses because the masses will search for O365, not Hosted Exchange.
That's not how the price comparison works. Hosted Exchange is $4, it's not very buried, every MS Partner (the recommended way to deal with O365) is quite aware as are every community discussing it. It's listed all over the place. Google takes you right there, if you are looking for Exchange you would almost always go there first (Google, that is.) The way that normal people look for information they would never even know that it was "buried." If people are seeking Office 365 and not Exchange, chance are they aren't looking for Exchange anyway.
Using $5 because it isn't prominently displayed is not a good way to do cost comparisons. The price is $4, it just is. If you are going by "prices commonly known by average people" all kinds of things break down. In IT we need to work with the real prices and the prices we can get, not the prices "as understood by average people."
Average people don't work in IT, don't implement Exchange, can't implement Exchange safely or cost effectively, don't need business email, etc. The prices to them really do not apply. Just because it takes a little effort to look up a price doesn't mean that we should use a different price when doing evaluations of value.
Once you go down the path of "assumed" pricing you can wind up with anything. For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!) so do you include the price of a SAN in the cost of an on-premises Exchange deployment? Of course not, nor do you use the prices of a different O365 plan.
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@coliver said:
I know I'm late to the party.
I don't think I've ever had a complete Office 365 outage. I've had occasions where a few users couldn't log in or receive email.... but never an occasion where we were completely unable to access our email.
Same here, it always seems to be very isolated.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Exactly. I only give remote access to those that require it. It's a fairly crude and trivial layer of security, but all the same I have some fears about giving all staff remote access to our data.
Remote access to data and remote access to their individual email accounts is a little different, though. Granted, their email is your data, no question there, just that it is data that they already have complete access to and manage themselves. It's not like more general data.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I think it is less than that they are tinkering and more than their infrastructure is more complex. You probably only have one or two email servers. Places where I have been have hundreds of them. They constantly need to have hardware maintenance, patches applies, clustering managed, capacity planning done, etc. And they are attacked much more often. Once you add clustering, especially on a big scale, you get lots and lots of issues. But it is pretty hard to avoid in a massive environment, even if only for handling the capacity.
Yep, our whole system is complex so it can have issues easily. But, we have many people who can work on any issues quickly. We get many attempted attacks from China daily as well, sometimes hourly or worse.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I think it is less than that they are tinkering and more than their infrastructure is more complex. You probably only have one or two email servers. Places where I have been have hundreds of them. They constantly need to have hardware maintenance, patches applies, clustering managed, capacity planning done, etc. And they are attacked much more often. Once you add clustering, especially on a big scale, you get lots and lots of issues. But it is pretty hard to avoid in a massive environment, even if only for handling the capacity.
Yep, our whole system is complex so it can have issues easily. But, we have many people who can work on any issues quickly. We get many attempted attacks from China daily as well, sometimes hourly or worse.
Which, in turn, leads to more, smaller issues but less often to complete fires including the loss of the entire environment.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Exactly. I only give remote access to those that require it. It's a fairly crude and trivial layer of security, but all the same I have some fears about giving all staff remote access to our data.
Remote access to data and remote access to their individual email accounts is a little different, though. Granted, their email is your data, no question there, just that it is data that they already have complete access to and manage themselves. It's not like more general data.
They could just as easily email to their personal emails.
