Exchange 2003 Design and Architecture (2)

Overview of current communication infrastructure

Managing a complex communications infrastructure within Microsoft is a team task involving many different groups within OTG. From an organizational perspective, OTG consists of more than 2,500 workers who are responsible for operations across more than 400 IT locations worldwide. In addition to providing IT tools for the company, OTG also played an important role in helping Microsoft meet the key business objectives of software development and marketing. As the first and best customer of Microsoft, OTG was an early adopters of Microsoft's new software, such as Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Office 2003, and Exchange Server 2003. The result of this process is the industry's well-known "eating your own dog food (eat your own dog food)." ”

In OTG's "dog food" communications environment, servers often accept software patches, operating system test versions and upgrades, Exchange Server beta versions and upgrades, and so on. Each month OTG averaged two such software upgrades for each Exchange server. The purpose of implementing changes to the software is to test new scenarios, meet specific requirements, and continually run the latest application concepts by performing enterprise-level testing in a real-world environment. In OTG, the rate of change was very high.

Microsoft employees give a heavy load to the communications infrastructure. Microsoft's average employee has 3 computers, typically all of which are used to synchronize with Exchange. In addition, a considerable number of employees are carrying Pocket PCs and Smartphone devices that are also synchronized with Exchange. At Microsoft, the average remote procedure call (RPC) operation per second (a way of measuring work) is much higher than any other company known to OTG. Microsoft often works with customers and partners to test their communications infrastructure. The workloads that are processed on the Microsoft,exchange server are typically more than twice times higher than those measured in these companies.

When writing this article, Microsoft's communications environment consists of more than 200 servers in 75 locations worldwide, including 190 Exchange 2003 servers (113 of which are mailbox servers), including servers in an additional cross forest test environment. This environment supports:

• Global mail flow has 6,000,000 e-mails a day, with an average of 2,500,000 Internet e-mails a day, of which 70% are annoying spam, virus-infected, or e-mail messages that are sent to an invalid email address. Comparing the bytes on the line will reveal that at Microsoft, the ratio of blocked messages to the content of the received message is 40:1. Typical e-mail messages have an average size of KB.

• Approximately 85,000 mailboxes, each from MB capacity limit to MB. The average MB mailbox size is only MB.

• More than 85,500 distribution groups.

• Public folder servers manage more than 230,000 unique public folders.