Exchange 12 - 64 bit only!
So I'm sitting in the keynote at ITForum listening to Bob Muglia's keynote talk on our Windows Server roadmap, and noticed a couple of interesting things. Firstly, our 64 bit plans. We're going to support 32bit Windows until 2017 and then 32 bit support will only be available via custom support, but the thing that really caught my eye was the statement about Exchange. Exchange 12 (E12) will only be made available in 64 bit. Yes, I said only.....
The product team have been testing E12 on 32 bit and 64 bit, and have found some significant gains and a reduction of IOs per second which results in really good performance gains. They tested Exchange on 64 bit and found almost a 75% reduction in IOs per second compared with Exchange 2003.
This could result in almost a 4X increase in the number of users on the same disks or require 1/4 the disks to support the same users from a throughput perspective. If you think about this, it's quite significant since it will proportionately decrease the investment in storage which accounts for ~80% of the capital cost of Mailbox servers. And thats worth noting.
I also unserstand that during the betas, there will be both a 32 bit and 64 bit version of Exchange 12 so you can compare the performance gains. The other useful thing is that when you're upgrading to 64bit Exchange 12 you won't need to upgrade your global catalog servers to 64 bit as well. It's a good idea to do the upgrade though and take advantage of the massive IO reduction. And as E12 will support mixed 32 bit and 64 bit environments including legacy Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2000 servers. You can also connect to either 32 bit or 64-bit Outlook.
So quite an interesting keynote... I'm looking forward to the rest of IT forum!
PS - Mark has poiinted to the official press release here...
