These days everybody’s job is increasingly reliant on the availability of e-mail. Dell recognizes that companies of all sizes require email solutions to function effectively. To that end, Dell has engineered a sizing tool for deploying Microsoft Exchange 2003—the Exchange Advisor Tool. This easy-to-use tool helps customers design a draft of their Exchange infrastructure. It asks simple questions and translates those answers into a Dell recommended draft or general architecture for the Exchange infrastructure. The tool recommends back-end servers, storage, software and services. Additionally, we have partnered with Symantec to provide options for security and archiving products. To coincide with today's announcement with them, we'll launch a Secure Exchange site that will be live soon.

These recommendations are not based on existing whitepapers or rules of thumb—rather, they are based on performance and sizing studies conducted by the Global Solutions Engineering team. The latest round of testing and validation incorporates the PowerEdge 9^th Generation servers, the Dell | EMC CX3-20/40/80 storage as well as the PowerVault MD1000 storage enclosure. We plan to continue updating the sizing tool on regular intervals, keeping up with Dell’s hardware and software releases as well as being ready for the Exchange 2007 launch.

The ultimate goal here is to help customers select the hardware, software, and services offerings that are best suited for their requirements by helping them perform what-if scenarios with the different options available for the messaging solution that best suits them.

In this vlog, I give more insight into how we architect and test hardware environments to provide data for the Exchange sizing tool. Please check out the tool and share your thoughts.