News

Unisys-Avanade Market Package for Huge Exchange Environments

• By Scott Bekker
• April 03, 2003

Think you've got a big Exchange installation? Unisys and Avanade may have a server for you. The companies on Thursday announced a packaged offering based on the Unisys 32-processor-capable ES7000 server that can support more than 45,000 Exchange users.

The idea behind the offering is that Unisys can provide mainframe-class reliability and scalability with the ES7000 in combination with Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. The servers can be partitioned to support a fully functional cluster within the ES7000 cabinet, which includes such redundant features as the ability to plug into different power grids.

On top of that hardware, Avanade will customize and optimize Exchange 2000 for the customer's environment. Avanade is a joint consulting and systems integration venture between Accenture and Microsoft.

"The demand for highly available and scalable solutions on the Microsoft Exchange 2000 platform has increased dramatically over the past year," said Adam Warby, vice president and general manager of Avanade.

Whether that demand has increased enough for customers to consider the paradigm shift of rolling traditionally distributed Exchange servers into one massive box is a big question.

By comparison, a Microsoft benchmark page showing how more standard hardware handles user loads shows two- and four-processor systems supporting up to 13,200 MMB2, a loose approximation for a medium-load Exchange user.

The Unisys-Avanade package is based on Exchange 2000, as opposed to Exchange 2003, which is planned for release sometime around June.