Mobile Access for Exchange 2003

[kimdoy]

Hello everyone,
My company runs MS Exchange 2003 on Windows server 2003 Standard Edition SP2.
It is running on DELL PowerEdge 2950( 8 Intel Zeon 2.33GHz CPUs, 4GB memory, OS on RAID 1, Exchange Data on RAID5).
Currently the single Exchange server serves about 400 email users, and will serve 600 email users soon.
Most of users use OWA, not outlook.
The server is running very healthy state currently. CPU, memory and network usages constantly hits very low.
Currently most users are not allowed to access their email using their Smartphone. It is disabled.
Our company is planning to allow users to access their email using Smartphone.
Does anybody have general idea how much resources need to allow 600 users connect email using Smartphone, what is system requirement, any performance difference between allowing Smartphone and disallowing, so on?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[58sniper]

IIRC from way back in the 2003 days, an EAS enabled phone adds negligable IOPS. Blackberry, on the other hand, adds substantial IOPS to the server (often 3x).

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

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ntinlin]

Only thing to bear in mind really about SmartPhones is to have the ActiveSync management util installed so you can do remote wipes.
But also make sure your compliance department, if any, are happy with this plan. The restrictions you can put on activesync with Exchange 2003 are virtually non-existent.

Blackberry annoys the hell out of me most of the time but their enterprise control possibilites for individual handhelds are hard to beat compared to EAS.

I'm trying to remember if MS even mention AS Smartphones in the capacity planning spreadsheet. Don't think so. Blackberry users get a multiplier of either 3.4 or 3.6 I forget which since it hammers Exchange with MAPI requests.

Neill