How much does Exchange really cost?

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OUTLOOK 2003 VL comes FREE w/ EXCHANGE LICENSE and other wrong data.....

Two BEEFY servers for 800 users?


A 5000.00 HP Proliant DL 380 will be more than sufficient to host 800 mail clients. And that is OVERKILL.


CALS come with the 3 to 4K license cost.


And here's the kicker, TWO FT Exchange Admins to handle 800 users?


My largest client has almost 2000 users on their windows 2003 AD Domain. Two, 3000.00 to 4000.00 (can get sales on servers two) DL 380s makeup the 2 domain controllers that handle this network 24/7/365 with 99.99% uptime. Site is a hospitial, fiber backbone of course and all clients are full Gb.


The EXCHANGE server is also a DL 380 with RAID 5 (3 72GB drives, so effectively 144GB of storage) initially but now on SAN.


That DL 380 cost around 4,000.00. The network admin/datacom/client manager handles exchange and there is not nearly enough exchange work for 2 FTEs, that is crazy.

And, 50% of those users have web access to exchange which is a snap to setup and still gives you a very full featured set of Outlook like tools. the interface look remarkably close to Outlook 2003 in fact. So managing mail around the globe is a snap. Secure web mail on exchange is a snap.


Daily operations of adding/removing users, changing other attributes etc. and menial tasks are handled by an operator that grandfathered into IT from DP days as a keypunch operator, as they were called. she keyed charges before each dept. ordered their own procedures directly into the H.I.S. and the system could handle auto sending of batches from all clinical depts.


Learning the basics of Exchange is a breeze.


The guy that does network admin/datacom (has a biomed guy that helps with grunt work)and makes around 40K, but also manages 70+ servers, switch upgrades, the works. That is not a huge job for a site with a few thousand users.




This blog is ridiculous. For 800 users it's 4000 for a server, even if you want full redundancy and don't have a SAN and any OS virtualization, it's still 8000.00 plus a portion of 1 FTE wages, which you'd need for Google to troubleshoot internet related issues and client access issues and ESP. security, since the google solution is much more insecure with every client inhouse exposing itself with an open connection to the internet all of the time.


The GOOGLE cost was 50 per seat per year.


Do the math, after you put 500,000 into upgrading your network to handle the new load of internet traffic, and upgrade your internet connections, at the least and this includes upgrading clients to full Gb connections, very time intensive, you might get the initial cost within 500,000, but probably more.


the 50 x 800 x . Let's go with 10, as exchange server is relevant for a good 10 years, or at least has been in the past considering there are tons of sites still running Exchange 5.5. There's another 400,000. So you a million in the Google solution and 4K server, 4K software wtih free VL for Outlook clients over 10 years 8000.00, so that's 800 bucks a year, or one dollar per client per year. Yes, it is that inexpensive. I see this everyday.


Google is 40,000 per year for client and 500,000 network costs / 10 is 50,000 so 90,000 per year for 800 clients is over 100 per client.


GOOGLE Solution is ONE HUNDRED TIMES more than Exchange solution and you get FAR less ability and functionality.


For instance, warehousing email and making use out of it for BI is impossible with Google.


Same with the apps, they are so lightweight and functionality thin, and the data is not accessible in teh ways it is inhouse to be backend to BI infrastructure, there is just so much ROI lost on the Google Apps.


All it does is remove the cost of upkeep on one server, 2 at most inhouse when most even SMB sites are hosting dozens of servers, SAN and clients into the thousands.


The time of Google Apps, or any hosted apps time has still simply not come.


And most sites, like healthcare organizations, are not ready to be storing PHI on Google servers which may be owned by Google for unlimited time.


Exchange is 100 times less in cost and give 1000 percent more in value by having your email on site under your own control and security w/o 800 open internet connections at all times.


And for those with laptops who have their exchange data store securely locally, Outlook is a smart client and they can do all of their work anywhere without an internet connection in terms of replying to all of their email and reading everything that came in since they were last on-line.


And considering the price of disc, users can have more than 6GB of storage these days w/o breaking the bank.

Posted by: xuniL_z   Posted on: 11/15/08  (Edited: 11/15/2008 @ 07:11) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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