Exchange 2003 75 GB Limit, Upgrade to 2010? 1

[Toni269]

Someone asked me if their Exchange 2003 with (Company 65 employees/average usage) is at 72GB with a 75GB limitation, their consultant advised them to upgrade to Exchange 2010. They said the software is free but would require 40 consulting hours to install. They asked if upgrading to 2003 "Enterprise" with unlimited database size is a better/more or less expensive alternative?

Thank you,

Toni

 

[58sniper]

That's a very loaded question. First, 2010 is only "free" if the customer has Software Assurance on their existing licenses.

The customer needs to determine their requirements. If they don't want the new features of 2010, understand the support lifecycle of 2003, and are willing to accept that, then upgrading to Exchange 2003 Enterprise would likely be ok. There are several things to consider. The first is what is the storage picture? Just because they can upgrade to Enterprise doesn't mean that having more data is going to be painless. What's the backup/recovery SLAs? Is there sufficient storage? Do you have enough space to handle an offline defrag (db size + 10%).

From a supportability standpoint, I'd push them to make the move to 2010. But that's not something that's as easy as sticking in the Enterprise disk and doing an upgrade. Upgrade to Enterprise, and get them going on an upgrade to 2010 in the NEAR future.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/

 

[Toni269]

Excellent! Thank you very much for your help!

 

[baddos]

40 hours for a single exchange server housing 65 users sounds pretty amazing.

 

[58sniper]

I would assume that that includes discovery, design, implementation, and post install support. That's actually pretty low, if you ask me.

BUT - there may have been a fair amount of discovery already done, or a fair amount of previous knowledge transferred.

For us, most of our migrations start at 10 weeks, and go from there.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/

 

[Madrox]

Old post I know but...

Why not have the users archive off their old emails into PST's and clear up all that room? Have you made sure they spent a little time clearing out deleted emails, big file attachments, etc?

I have people do this every January so I have them make a folder for 2010 and copy their folders to the PST. If they cant be bothered then I do it for them. The only downside (that I've found) is they don't have access to it via OWA.

 

[58sniper]

Why not have the users archive off their old emails into PST's

because that brings up all kinds of problems, including retention (legal), eDiscovery, storage, lack of access via OWA and EAS, backup and restore, and supportability (you can't put .pst files on network servers).

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/