Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox Server Storage Cost Calculator
This is another great tool from the Microsoft Exchange Team: Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox Server Storage Cost Calculator.
Here's a brief description of the tool, according to this post at the You Had Me At EHLO blog:
In order to move forward with various designs like large mailboxes, IT departments need to understand one of the chief costs associated with Exchange mailbox servers, namely storage. To that end, the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Cost Calculator is designed to help you determine a portion of the mailbox server cost, namely the disk cost (purchase price and lifecycle power and cooling costs). The calculator helps in two ways:
- The calculator takes a series compares a series of storage design configurations and determines their respective costs. The underlying goal here is two-fold:
- To show that you can achieve the same capacity and I/O requirements utilizing Small Form Factor SAS disks for relatively the same cost as Large Form Factor FC disks.
- To show that there are other disk solutions (e.g., SATA) that can be viable and reduce the disk footprint cost.
- In the situation where you are unsure whether you want to deploy Single Copy Clusters (SCC) or Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), the calculator can compare SCC+SAN disk configurations against CCR+DAS disk configurations from a cost perspective.
Hopefully these measurements will show the value from a cost perspective in considering other disk designs, coupled with large mailboxes and continuous replication.