Exchange server Implemenetation Analysis
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I agree Dash. In the last 3 years, since I rolled out Exchange 2010, I don't think I've had any downtime during working hours at all. Zero. I've had some planned downtime at the weekends/evenings when I've done reboots, but that's it.
Meanwhile, @scottalanmiller always seems to be posting on here that O365 is experiencing problems. It doesn't sound that reliable at all to me. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that hosted is more reliable than on-premise.
As for cost. I haven't worked it out recently, but I believe licence costs have worked out lower than subscription costs over 3 years. As for the time value of money, keen followers of my posts will probably know by now that I am an extremely lazy systems administrator. I do nothing with Exchange, it just sits there. Rightly, or wrongly, my time investment is practically zero. We also use filtering services to mitigate downtime as Dash suggested. Of course, I may just have been lucky.
That leaves security. I don't know. Our Exchange server is exposed to the internet, so is threatened, but I block OWA and ActiveSync for the majority of users. My fears with O365 security relate to compromised passwords.
I'm moving to O365 this year, but that's partly because of all the other products and services it offers. I'm not sure I migrate if it was just for hosted Exchange.
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@Dashrender said:
Remember that we already have to have hardware in place to run a file server, so adding a bit more to support OK performance on SBS was minimal. The cost of this server and required licensing would be generally paid for in under 3 years compared to the cost of O365 (assuming $5/month/user).
$4/user/month. 25% extra is a lot to add on. $4 for Exchange, $1 for non-Exchange (Rackspace.)
Considering that you need things like spam filtering and anti-virus, normally hosted and typically for around $2/month, the cost of hosted email is really cheap. Remember you need storage, backups, IT time, etc. for that in house stuff too.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
My fears with O365 security relate to compromised passwords.
In what way are you more afraid of the O365 passwords than the on premises ones? Is this because the on premises users can't access their mail from the outside at all? So on is purely an internal service and one is more than that?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Meanwhile, @scottalanmiller always seems to be posting on here that O365 is experiencing problems. It doesn't sound that reliable at all to me. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that hosted is more reliable than on-premise.
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.
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Where are those prices? Everything I see for O365 is $5 and my customer who moved to Rackspace through NTG is being charged $2/user/month (and they don't have active sync).
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).
As for backups, I need that for my file server anyhow - so adding Exchange support does at a bit of cost, but not an outlandish amount.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Meanwhile, @scottalanmiller always seems to be posting on here that O365 is experiencing problems. It doesn't sound that reliable at all to me. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that hosted is more reliable than on-premise.
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.
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).
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@Dashrender said:
Where are those prices? Everything I see for O365 is $5 and my customer who moved to Rackspace through NTG is being charged $2/user/month (and they don't have active sync).
O365 Hosted Exchange has been $4 for years. We post about it constantly. It's never been anything but $4. That's the price it started at, that's the price it remains.
https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/exchange-online
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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.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
My fears with O365 security relate to compromised passwords.
In what way are you more afraid of the O365 passwords than the on premises ones? Is this because the on premises users can't access their mail from the outside at all? So on is purely an internal service and one is more than that?
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.
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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.
