Helping the Kid's Help Phone - Exchange Hardware

When I first met with the guys at KHP they had a list of things they wished worked better in their organization, I mean who doesn't?  I remember being in that position where you would love to do this, buy that or implement the latest technology.  Problem is, it all costs money, takes up time, and it is not like there is plenty of free time in the life of most IT Pro's.  Now they have a different issue as we have taken some of the cost out of the picture by donating software and even some personnel, how do you decide what to do first?

That question was answered pretty easily after meeting the president of KHP.  Calendars, meeting scheduling, and collaboration are the key challenges right now and so it became pretty obvious that we needed to get Exchange Server 2007 inplace.  With that in place we can work on getting Office 2007 deployed which will work nicely with MOSS 2007 and of course, Vista.  Now all we need to do is order some hardware and after some discussion we decided on the following....

  • Supermicro Superserve 6015P - 1U
  • Intel Xeon Dual Core 3.0GHz
  • Four (4) Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA II hard drives (RAID 10 config)
  • Four (4) 2GB Kingston 667MHz DDR2 ECC (8GB total)

Not a bad little server and should do fine for 500 or so mailboxes it will eventually house.  As soon as the hardware arrives, the installation of Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 will be installed and we can begin preparing the environment for Exchange Server 2007 and run some tests to see how we are going to migrate from the current POP3 mail solution to the new system.  Something tells me I will also be delivering some training to the staff.  Maybe an opportunity to go back to my roots as "The Lazy Admin" and create some videos like the one in My Favorite Office Trick.......