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New Exchange Server 2010 Solution from HP and Microsoft Delivers Large, Low-cost Mailboxes with Ease

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A year ago, Microsoft and HP undertook a challenge to provide our customers with solutions to deliver faster business results.  Our approach would be to create new appliances for key IT workloads, including virtualization and management, business intelligence, and email.  We called this partnership “Infrastructure To Applications” (I2A).

On the one year anniversary of I2A, HP and Microsoft disclosed the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. I am very excited today to announce the availability of the E5000.

What is the E5000?

The E5000 is a solution which incorporates everything required to run Exchange Server 2010. The solution has been jointly engineered by both companies, and includes (in a single piece of hardware) the following:

  • Two blade servers
  • Direct attached storage disks
  • Redundant networking and power
  • Pre-loaded and preconfigured Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 SP1
  • HP’s 3 year, 24x7 hardware and software support

Large, low-cost mailboxes made easy

In this age of high email volumes and large attachments, a 100MB mailbox doesn’t provide sufficient storage. By using low cost, direct-attached storage, the E5000 is optimized to deliver Exchange 2010’s promise of large, low-cost mailboxes, offering either 1GB or 2.5GB mailbox sizes by default. 

The all-in-one solution ships pre-configured and optimized for Exchange Server 2010 using best practice architecture from both HP and Microsoft. We’ve also included specially developed quick deployment tools preloaded on the E5000. These two elements significantly reduce your Exchange 2010 deployment planning and configuration time to just hours. 

And in the spirit of keeping costs down, the E5000 offers a few additional benefits.  Its 3U form factor saves at least 25% space in the datacenter, and saves up to 50% on power consumption as compared to a similar configuration using multiple hardware components. 

And last but not least, the solution is backed by HP’s 24/7 hardware and software support, including a four-hour on-site hardware response.

Why you should take a look at the E5000

Easy to deploy, feature rich, and with large, low-cost mailboxes, the E5000 is a fantastic way to upgrade from Exchange 2003 or 2007, or to migrate from Lotus Notes to Exchange 2010.  The E5000 also has the ability to scale, both in mailbox size and number of users, making this a great solution for single site deployments, distributed IT environments, and remote office scenarios. And in HP’s words:

“The E5000 has brought the best of HP and Microsoft together into a single all-in-one solution for email.  Our customers will be able to realize the benefits of Exchange Server 2010 with HP hardware specifically designed to make the E5000 easy to deploy and manage with large, low-cost mailboxes and high availability already pre-configured and ready to go.” - Tom Joyce, Vice-President, StorageWorks, HP

With the joint engineering investments made by both companies and the hardware from HP, we are so excited by the result that HP and Microsoft are calling the E5000 a “preferred solution” for Exchange.

To learn more about the E5000, visit Exchange’s E5000 website.

Julia White

Senior Director, Exchange Product Management

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2011
    How does it come pre-loaded and pre-configured with exchange when exchange requires AD to work?

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2011
    Exchange resource www.msexchange.org/.../deploying-exchange-resource-forest-part1.html

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2011
    So Oleg....are you saying that it comes preconfigured with an Active Directory domain/forest for resources as well? That would be a little odd in my opinion...and not a best practice. AD and Exchange shouldn't be installed on the same server.

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2011
    The E5000 Messaging System is installed into a customer’s existing Active Directory (AD) using the deployment tools that are run when the E5000 system is installed. The setup process goes through two phases. The first phase confirms that the hardware is functioning, properly configured and performs the final Windows 2008 R2 setup configuration steps which include joining the server nodes to the AD domain. The second phase of the setup confirms that the proper AD requirements have been met and then installs Exchange 2010 SP1 onto the nodes, configures the Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG), creates the databases and copies and sets the activation preference between the servers. All of this is fully automated based on a simple set of inputs provided by the system administrator. In a simple Exchange 2010 deployment, this may be sufficient to bring the system online. In a more complex deployment, the configuration of the E5000 can be further tuned as you would adjust any Exchange 2010 server - all of the flexibility that comes with Exchange is optionally available to you.