GRAND PRIZE Large Business
Jack Bridgman,
Enterprise Strategy Consultant, International Network Services
Determine Email Usage Costs to Justify an Exchange Upgrade
Upgrading a huge, aging Exchange infrastructure is a formidable task, one that an organization might be inclined to postpone as long as possible. A client of Jack Bridgman's—a large government agency—was about "10 years behind in its Exchange architecture," he says. The agency enlisted Jack to advise it about how to overhaul its Exchange organization, then explain how it could cost-justify the upgrade to the elected officials in charge of the budget.
The client had 450 standalone Exchange Server 5.5 servers serving 15,000 government employees. The servers were scattered across multiple physical locations, and multiple support teams managed them. The Exchange organization was ripe for modernization and consolidation, and Jack's first piece of advice to the client addressed both needs. "They weren't taking advantage of some of the technologies that Microsoft had already incorporated in Exchange Server, like the antivirus API and edge spam-protection capabilities," says Jack, who advised the client to migrate to Exchange Server 2003 on a SAN. "Their servers and personnel were scattered around at five different data centers, and their backup capabilities were on different platforms using different software. [I told them] they needed to bring all their Exchange servers into two locations, put them on a SAN, and have them basically replicate that storage to each other for disaster recovery purposes," he says.
Although server consolidation seemed a straightforward solution, identity management was a big concern for the agency, whose employees include undercover law-enforcement personnel. Jack needed to find a way to ensure that security-sensitive departments' user profiles, email addresses, and other confidential information would be off limits to employees in other departments. "Certain groups—undercover detectives, vice, and narcs—felt security pains about letting the other groups know that they existed. Those guys didn't want anybody to know they even worked there," says Jack. To assuage security worries, Jack created IPsec policies to block unauthorized users from accessing secured domains on the servers and used public key infrastructure (PKI) to secure email messages.
Although the client approved of Jack's plan to update its Exchange infrastructure, the agency couldn't move forward with the plan until the mayor's office allocated it the money to do so. So Jack's next task was to produce the numbers—in this case, assign a dollar cost to email usage and storage—that would back up the client's request for new hardware and software. To do so, Jack first found a Gartner research report that provided dollar costs for email-message storage, sending email over the Internet, and sending email within the corporate network.
Now Jack had to determine the number and size of messages that agency employees were sending and receiving. To do so, he used Quest Software's Quest MessageStats to obtain an accurate count of the number of messages sent and received, message size, message origin and destination, and message volume within the Information Store (IS). Jack then used the Gartner figures as a basis for estimating how much a particular department or division was costing the government in terms of overhead for email support. "Because we were able to verify and certify the cost of these messages,we could provide charge-back dollar-amounts by department (and by individuals within those departments) to the CIO. If budgets had to be allocated based on storage of email, we could actually provide the IT department with the exact costs of storing email for different departments across their environment. The CIO can now implement a charge-back system, which is something he couldn't do before. And he can justify what he would be asking for and why," Jack says.
Jack's solution helped his client simplify and upgrade its archaic Exchange infrastructure while addressing security concerns. At the same time, he devised a solid approach to cost-justifying an Exchange and storage upgrade. "We came up with some astounding figures to provide to the CIO, basically some ammunition to let the agency go back and get another dip out of the budgetary well," says Jack. The agency was able to justify consolidating its Exchange servers on a SAN in one data center and successfully implemented Jack's recommendations.
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Chet December 08, 2005 (Article Rating: