Posted by
Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E Complete
Customer questions relating to Exchange resource forests are becoming more and more common for our technical team. Organizations want to consolidate their existing Exchange environments to a single Active Directory (AD) forest running
Exchange 2010, while leaving their user accounts in their old AD domains.
Merging multiple AD forests into a single forest is a
VERY complex undertaking, which requires transitioning workstations, laptops, servers, printers and all applications that interact within that AD environment. So it’s no wonder that customers shy away from that
migration project and go with a brand new build-out of an Exchange resource forest to run their messaging environment in a more centralized, consolidated infrastructure.
This may become an even more common method to deploy
Exchange 2013 when it is released. However, there are some serious challenges related to linking active user accounts from one AD environment to a separate Exchange AD forest and successfully migrating all the email data intact.
In this article, I’m going to discuss the different steps that MUST be performed to do this manually and describe how our E2E Complete software automates this entire process.
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Binary Tree specializes in
email migrations and it is quite often that we attend planning workshops with customers that are preparing for their
transition to Exchange 2010. During these meetings, a very common question that comes up is,
“How fast can we migrate to the new environment?” And it may sound tongue-in-cheek but our standard answer to this question is,
“You can migrate as fast as you want.”
This usually comes as quite a shock to the project teams. However, as we explain the scalability of migration processing they come to understand that the theoretical limits for migration speeds are really only bound by the available bandwidth on their network and the speed of their servers. The more migration infrastructure (sessions and processing methods) you configure within your environment, the faster the data will get moved.
The true gating factor is the practical limitation of migrating end-users,
NOT their mailbox data. Moving mailbox data is easy, moving end-users is hard. The change management aspects of a migration project, which include end-user training, desktop updates/refresh, communications, migration scheduling, help-desk support, among other things, are truly the limiting factors for how fast you can migrate email to a new platform.
But customers always want to know how they can perform an accurate estimation of their data throughput for a migration to see what their theoretical limitations are for the project. There are two important factors that I’ll describe in this post which are key to crystalizing a migration throughput estimate:
- Identify and Validate a Single Migration Speed Unit (for each source and target location)
- Perform a Migration Test in the Production Environment with Real Mailbox Data
Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
The recent announcement of the strategic partnership between Mimecast and Binary Tree may have caught a few people by surprise. But for those of you that fully understood the value proposition of each company, you saw the integration benefits right away. The synergies between the solutions will help customers transition to an optimized Exchange messaging platform with a reduced risk of user impact for downtime or data loss. Migrating e-mail and calendaring data poses many challenges. Not only can it be very time consuming and costly, the risk of data being lost or becoming corrupted is greatly heightened during this process. Were this to happen to important commercial or sensitive information, the financial and legal repercussions could be significant. Most CIO’s don’t want to gamble with the success of their messaging migration, and that’s why the strategic partnership between Binary Tree and Mimecast makes perfect sense.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. A recent survey of 500 IT decision makers from organizations in different industries and from different geographies found that 77% of companies plan to upgrade their messaging platforms in the next two years. This watershed event is driven by the ubiquitous adoption of Exchange 2010 for on-premises implementations and the great momentum around hosted Exchange solutions like Microsoft Office 365. And during these transition projects customers are looking to optimize their messaging environment at the same time. Common advancements on their wish list include full-featured archiving with automated retention policies and fast search integration, simplified Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam security, and super high-availability. Together, Binary Tree and Mimecast provide a streamlined and risk free solution to help customers transition to their messaging platform of the future.
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Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
The blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about the lack of a ratings system for specialized software tools on the market, included a specific Latin phrase, “Caveat Emptor”, or “Let the buyer beware”. Well, since I wrote that blog, I have been reminded of just how relevant that saying is in the IT industry.
Over the past three weeks, I have interviewed a handful of different companies that have gone through a cross-forest email migration project in the past couple of years. And believe it or not, they had to move their mailbox data twice.
Yep, you read that right; they were forced to migrate huge amounts of mail and calendar data TWICE.
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Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
When you go shopping for a new car, kitchen appliance, or a flat-screen TV, it’s likely that you did your research ahead of time. And odds are that you read up on the best brands in
Consumer Reports. Hey, it’s great information, and it’s inexpensive. Their tagline is
“Expert Unbiased Product Ratings & Reviews.” They include all the specs for the products, customer reviews, and provide the details on features and functionality. Don’t ya wish we had that type of ratings report for specialty software tools available on the market?
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