EMC Shoots for Exchange Efficiency

EMC released a package it says will improve
e-mail productivity on Microsoft Exchange Server.
Express Solution for E-Mail is the first in what the company promises will be a
series of products that provide information lifecycle management
for small- and medium-sized businesses.

The EMC Express Solution for E-Mail includes hardware, software and services
to help SMBs manage information throughout all phases of
its life, including creation, archiving and disposal.

Todd Donaldson, director of Global Solutions at EMC, said the company created the package to help organizations that have up to several thousand employees consolidate and manage e-mail messages on a single storage system.

Express Solution for E-Mail includes the EMC Clariion mid-tier networked storage with Fibre
Channel and ATA drives and replication software; EMC
Legato EmailXtender Archive Edition software to expand user mailbox size by
moving antiquated e-mail to lower-cost drives; EMC Replication Manager/SE
(RM/SE) software to automate replication management; and the EMC Exchange
Accelerator Service to offer customers fast storage deployment for Microsoft
Exchange Server environments.

Together, the products and services are designed to replace the
old-fashioned, cumbersome distributed network of Exchange servers, which
Donaldson said served as drones with merely a 50-megabyte limit.
These networks would often consist of one Exchange server powering as many
as 1,000 seats, making uptime low and file retrieval difficult.

EMC’s express e-mail bundle promises to handle as many as 5,000 users for
near limitless e-mail. Moreover, archiving is done automatically, and file
retrieval takes only about an hour to restore, rather than several hours for
legacy Exchange environments.

Donaldson told internetnews.com that the package could reduce total
cost of ownership by as much as 30 percent, making mailboxes lighter and
thinner to maximize performance.

Available now, the bundle has the full support of Microsoft. Moreover, in
late 2004, customers will be able to observe the product at Microsoft
Technical Centers (MTCs).

The package is available from partners, such as Dimension Data, MTI
Technology, Pomeroy IT Solutions and SARCOM, through a wizard that selects
configurations from a database in EMC’s Channel Express ordering system.

Express Solution for E-Mail runs $120,000 for an implementation that serves 1,000 workers, or
$373,000 for 5,000 workers. Enterprises can buy individual pieces of the
total package for $43,000.