New Exchange Server 2010 Solution from HP and Microsoft Delivers Large, Low-cost Mailboxes with Ease

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A year ago, Microsoft and HP undertook a challenge to provide our customers with solutions to deliver faster business results.  Our approach would be to create new appliances for key IT workloads, including virtualization and management, business intelligence, and email.  We called this partnership “Infrastructure To Applications” (I2A).

On the one year anniversary of I2A, HP and Microsoft disclosed the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. I am very excited today to announce the availability of the E5000.

What is the E5000?

The E5000 is a solution which incorporates everything required to run Exchange Server 2010. The solution has been jointly engineered by both companies, and includes (in a single piece of hardware) the following:

  • Two blade servers
  • Direct attached storage disks
  • Redundant networking and power
  • Pre-loaded and preconfigured Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 SP1
  • HP’s 3 year, 24x7 hardware and software support

Large, low-cost mailboxes made easy

In this age of high email volumes and large attachments, a 100MB mailbox doesn’t provide sufficient storage. By using low cost, direct-attached storage, the E5000 is optimized to deliver Exchange 2010’s promise of large, low-cost mailboxes, offering either 1GB or 2.5GB mailbox sizes by default. 

The all-in-one solution ships pre-configured and optimized for Exchange Server 2010 using best practice architecture from both HP and Microsoft. We’ve also included specially developed quick deployment tools preloaded on the E5000. These two elements significantly reduce your Exchange 2010 deployment planning and configuration time to just hours. 

And in the spirit of keeping costs down, the E5000 offers a few additional benefits.  Its 3U form factor saves at least 25% space in the datacenter, and saves up to 50% on power consumption as compared to a similar configuration using multiple hardware components. 

And last but not least, the solution is backed by HP’s 24/7 hardware and software support, including a four-hour on-site hardware response.

Why you should take a look at the E5000

Easy to deploy, feature rich, and with large, low-cost mailboxes, the E5000 is a fantastic way to upgrade from Exchange 2003 or 2007, or to migrate from Lotus Notes to Exchange 2010.  The E5000 also has the ability to scale, both in mailbox size and number of users, making this a great solution for single site deployments, distributed IT environments, and remote office scenarios. And in HP’s words:

“The E5000 has brought the best of HP and Microsoft together into a single all-in-one solution for email.  Our customers will be able to realize the benefits of Exchange Server 2010 with HP hardware specifically designed to make the E5000 easy to deploy and manage with large, low-cost mailboxes and high availability already pre-configured and ready to go.” - Tom Joyce, Vice-President, StorageWorks, HP

With the joint engineering investments made by both companies and the hardware from HP, we are so excited by the result that HP and Microsoft are calling the E5000 a “preferred solution” for Exchange.

To learn more about the E5000, visit Exchange’s E5000 website.

Julia White

Senior Director, Exchange Product Management