Hardware for small office environment

R

Ruhkande

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Apr 22, 2005
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15
Hello,

Not sure if this is the right spot for this question, but during my searching for answers, this is the location most often used, so here goes.

Backround:
I work for a small document intense firm (10-12 employees). We currently are running a continuously upgraded P4 2G server, with an Adaptec 2940U/UW raid controller (5x37GB Cheetas drive raid-5 array) for a file server that has handled our needs for some time. When it was initially set up, we were using SBS 2000 handling email with Exchange as well as working as a file server. We outsourced our mail later on for a couple of reasons, but my employer now wants to start using the Cingular Goodlink program with a set of Treo’s for our key employees. For this to work, I’ve got reinstate Exchange, which I completely removed by doing a clean W2K server install. After looking at how our email structure has changed, and the thousand-times increase in spam, I really think that Exchange needs its own box, especially with the extra software needed for Goodlink to do its job.

Question:
Should I build a new box for the Exchange server or build a new file-server and use our current machine to handle Exchange? Space is going to be an issue for us in a year or so on our current setup, but do you think the machine spec’d above will handle 10-12 email boxes a 2000+shared contact list, and a highly populated shared calendar?

On a side note, those with more experience with Exchange might know whether I can keep our current outsourced pop3 email account and just route them through the exchange box? I’ve read about its ability to do it, but is it functional, will I lose any features this way? If I have the send commands routed through exchange box to save sent mail on the server, I can spoof the “from” section of the email, right?

Thanks for the help, I’ve managed to lurk my answers off this forum for years now, but I finally found a unique question to ask.

WD
 
Exchange, as long as you're not doing any bulk email, will run on a PIII 800 with 512mb of ram. Also, the Best Practices want Exchange on it's own box (you can double-duty an IIS webserver with it; in fact, the default install enables IIS IIRC). I'm running it on a dual-Xeon 2.4ghz Dell from 2002. While it isn't a PIII, it's seems a little dated, and we were (accidentally) spamming (that's a "funny/ oh shit" story, not so much a "funny/ ha ha" story) about 140,000 mails an hour and we had a hard time even noticing a performance hit.

Running pop3 emails through an Exchange rig isn't hard, but it's tedious. You have to do it for each individual, depending on what exactly you're trying to do. Then again, you don't have that many users, so I can't imagine that you're looking at too steep a hill to climb. More the point, why will you need to maintain the other mail server? I don't follow.
 
Our current webhost isn’t charging us any extra for the mail hosting and has no peak on incoming email size. Also, though it doesn’t get it all, he’s running a linux box at ThePlanet (irony) that significantly reduces incoming spam. We are running a 10 user environment on the equivalent of a T1 (1.5/1.5), and I rather have that for my boss’s excessive browsing habits than downloading and filtering spam. We also have a satellite office with two users that VPN when required, and bandwidth is limited. I’ve been trying to find a better solution to our bandwidth limitations, but we are too far away from a phone station to get SDSL, so I can stack a few lines, and the initial costs of a true T1, T3, or DS3 seem to put out my employer. Anyways, I appreciate your advice, what exactly is the difficulty in setting up these pop->exchange boxes?

WD
 
Oh, you just have to type in everything by hand. I have some 400 users (mostly students), whenever something like that comes up it's a date with my girl caffeine tablets. And then, three months down the road is when the typos work their way to the top, once you've forgotten just exactly how it was that you were setting things up with from the start, but it's not an accident of irresponsibility, rather one of eventuality. Besides, you were sleep-deprived.
 
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