Exchange 2003 Design and Architecture (1)

Overview

Microsoft's Operations Technology Group (OTG) recently deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2003-The latest version of the company's industry-leading enterprise communications application. Not only does OTG serve countless employees and units within the company by running IT applications, but also as the first and best customer of various enterprise product development groups within Microsoft, first deployed within the organization before Microsoft software is available to external customers.

Porting from Microsoft Exchange Server to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 has brought many significant changes to Microsoft's communications architecture. OTG has moved to a fully clustered mailbox server environment. These server clusters connect one or more storage area networks (Sans) that are closed to their data stores. Using cluster technology significantly enhances reliability, increases availability, and improves the process of performing rolling upgrades.

The benefits of deploying Exchange 2003, especially with the benefits of deploying Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003, enable Microsoft to consolidate its communications infrastructure. OTG has started implementing the plan to consolidate 113 mailbox servers in 75 locations worldwide into 7 locations of 38 mailbox servers. Exchange 2003 can also support all mobile communications services on the same server, such as Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook Mobile Access (OMA), and Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), so that OTG was able to further integrate its global front-end server infrastructure.

The communication data storage infrastructure has also been updated. The data store is replaced with sans located in all locations, in combination with the SAN solution groups that were originally located at remote locations, directly connected small computer system interface (SCSI) storage arrays, and at the Washington State Redmond (Redmond,washington) headquarters data Center. These changes enabled OTG to increase the number of mailboxes per server while significantly enhancing the performance and capabilities of backup and recovery solutions.

By the time this article was written, OTG had greatly reduced the management overhead of Exchange, improved system performance and service availability, and enhanced its ability to perform service level agreement (SLA) responsibilities. These benefits will be more pronounced as Microsoft progressively achieves its consolidation goals.

Note: For security reasons, the names of forests, domains, internal resources, and organizations used in this article do not represent the true resource names used internally by Microsoft and are used for illustration purposes only.

Introduced

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 represents a significant and sustained investment by Microsoft in the Enterprise technology field. Exchange 2003 provides improved features for enterprise communications and collaborative customer needs. Many of the world's largest companies use Microsoft Exchange to run their messaging systems, including Microsoft.

This article is intended to provide an overview of the architectural and design decisions that Microsoft made during the upgrade to Exchange Server 2003. This article focuses on hardware selection and configuration issues in the project, while also discussing key technological advances and best practices obtained through upgrades. Because OTG was the leading provider of Microsoft technology and products, the Organization introduced a unique set of requirements and innovative approaches to meet customer needs. This article describes these requirements and methods, and how they affect deployment design decisions. The program readers of this white paper include technology decision-makers, system architects, IT executives, and messaging system administrators.