Date: Fri, 06 Jun 1997 23:27:44 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Stefan Molnar <stefan@exis.net> Cc: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <pgiffuni@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co>, Jim Dixon <jdd@vbc.net>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Exchange vs. Notes Message-ID: <199706070628.XAA01055@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 06 Jun 97 06:42:11 -0400. <Pine.LNX.3.95.970606063316.27351B-100000@sailfish.exis.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Note that this has moved to freebsd-chat...
>> ... Exchange...
>> cause that's my baby, and I firmly believe it's the "most powerful
>> messaging platform on the planet". :-)
>Just for my wondering what is the bigest Exchange network have you seen?
>I have seen a Notes setup that is the bigest I have ever seen, it was
>being run by Arthur Anderson/Anderson Consulting. When I was using it,
>I got databases, emails, etc. from half way around the world (some of the
>info I needed came from the UK) within a sec. An if I remember correctly
>they ran it on top of OS/2 for the server element, and they only needed
>two for the entire East Bay. I am not taking sides in this, but just as a
>normal person seeing threw the waters, that was an impressive setup.
Some of the largest Fortune 500 companies. The Unix issue is sort of
a heated one, especially because I love Unix as much as the rest of
you. So, I try to keep the NT posts few and far between. However,
this is not a Lotus list, so I feel I can feel free to not hold back.
Just in case it hasn't been obvious, for those of you who don't really
know me, I am a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. I work in the
Exchange Product Unit. I'm currently working on a new piece of
Exchange that will once again kick Notes' ass. Sorry that I can't
tell you more about it. :-)
The reason I don't post from a Microsoft account is because I choose
to do BSD in my spare time, and it has no affiliation at all with my
day-time work. I have been running BSD OS' since 386BSD 0.0. I
struggled through the Bill Jolitz era like all the other original free
BSDers. I ran the patch kit that Nate and Terry and others put
together. And I was one of the first people to run NetBSD 0.8,
practically the day after it came out. I struggled through the birth
of the shared library implementation now taken for granted. I
struggled once again through the 4.3 to 4.4 migration. I have
installed and administered a few FreeBSD machines as well, but the
majority of my time and effort has been spent on NetBSD.
Back to Notes. There isn't a lot to leave to speculation here. We do
a lot of perf testing in our own labs against various products. Our
driving mantras when pushing Exchange out the door for the first time
were Reliability and Performance. We celebrated the day we got the
Exchange client down to the "minimum theoretical number of RPCs" for a
SendMessage. Number of RPCs are just one of the release criteria
used when developing additional pieces of Exchange.
There are a few products that beat us in certain areas, but in
general, Notes isn't one of those products. Notes' only advantage are
a few obscure feature gaps that Exchange hasn't (yet) filled.
Remember that Exchange is only a year old, and we wanted to build the
best damn messaging platform first. We absolutely would not
compromise on that. Now that we've done that we'll go fill all the
workflow and groupware gaps.
One key point kind of shows the attitudes at work here. Lotus won't
let you release _any_ benchmark figures for Notes, without their
explicit permission. With good reason.
On the other hand, Microsoft ships load simulator clients with
Exchange that simulate various loads of real mail clients, so you can
generate your own tests, to find out how your servers will work on
your network. They believe so strongly in the performance of Exchange
Server that they _give_ you the stress testing tools with the server.
Also with good reason.
One large Exchange account in particular exemplifies what I am talking
about. Boeing tried Notes for awhile, and gave up. One of its
problems was that Notes simply couldn't handle their 300,000 user
directory. It simply was too big. Exchange swallowed it without
missing a beat. Exchange is barely more than a year old, and there
are already several large sites publicly affiliated with Exchange that
are larger than the _largest_ publicly affiliated notes site. Boeing
isn't the only site in the six digits.
I can't give you an exhaustive list because I don't work closely with
the marketing people, so I don't know which names I can say publicly,
and which ones I can't.
Of course, Microsoft is no small customer of Exchange itself. With
over 30,000 mailboxes, and over two million messages per day.
Remember also that these aren't 30,000 college students who might log
in once or twice a day to check mail, these are all active mailboxes
of people in a high tech company who actually use email all day long
for real work, and who are generally all connected and active at the
same time.
There is some very extremely cutting edge database technology used in
the Exchange Server store. It does complete crash recovery, live
backups without locking out any active functionality, on-line
automatic garbage collection, automatic replication, over high-speed
networks *or* low-speed connection-based intermittent lines, plus a
whole bunch of other cool things I can't think of right now. :-)
In fact, one key competitor (Netscape -- now who was talking about a
company that uses Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt as its primary
weapon?), is reduced to picking the _size_ of individual stores as the
primary weakness of Exchange. They can't find much else, so they tell
people Exchange can "only" support 400 users per server, because the
current size of an individual store is 16GB. Netscape pulled that
number of thin air somewhere (16GB == 400 users). Of course, the real
limit is much higher, if you go by user load. And, the next version
of Exchange has already betad the terabyte store, which should be
shipping shortly. So much for Netscape's biggest nit.
OK, so enough for the Exchange commercial. Suffice it to say that
even if you don't take me seriously as saying it is _the_ most
powerful messaging platform on the planet, it truly is _one_of_ the
most powerful.
Now I'm getting _more_ verbose than Terry. This is scary. :-)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199706070628.XAA01055>