Learn the Top Reasons Behind Poor Performance & Availability With Microsoft Exchange

admin    Misc     Availability, Behind, Exchange, Learn, Microsoft, Performance, Poor, Reasons

As a professional, your clients know they can depend on you, and that you are there for them. But what happens when your technology is not there for you? Imagine you are on the phone with your client, telling him with great pride that at long last the document he has been waiting for is complete. While you chat, you attach the document to an email, send it off…and wait.

And wait. The email is no longer in your outbox and not in his inbox. You double-check the email address, and as the conversation becomes more and more awkward, you assure the client that the document really does exist and there really was an email sent. He is frustrated and you are at a complete loss. You decide you cannot wait any longer and switch to your personal Hotmail account to resend the document, which may or may not work immediately either. The result is wasted time, and if you switched email systems, you no longer have a cohesive record of the exchange.

Your system administrator will list a number of reasons why this incident happened, reasons that are beyond his control:

The real reasons may actually run much deeper, which means that this lost email will not be an isolated incident.

Lost Emails Mean Lost Opportunities

Consumers, accustomed to fast responses through websites, are quickly losing their tolerance for slow email responses. Evidence of this can be seen through a recent study by the WAV Group, who claims in the real estate industry, the first agent to respond to a customer email inquiry has a 73% chance of securing the business. The third to respond has virtually no chance.[1] Similarly, a study conducted by Vodafone released in December of 2008 estimates that lost opportunities due to failures to reply promptly to email messages cost businesses approximately $27,000 a year.[2]

What about email that goes missing entirely? This summer Apple Corp admitted to “losing” 10% of their MobileMe subscribers email between July 16th and July 18th.[3] A wave of blog posts have popped up as a result of this problem, with subscribers making claims of everything from lost job opportunities to lost business. We tend to view email as a low cost service, yet clearly when it fails, the costs can be startling. Apple would only remark that the problem was due to a “serious issue.” So what exactly does happen to these wayward email messages, delayed or lost?

The truth is there are dozens of potential reasons for email delivery delays and errors. With complex business-grade email systems, like Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes, there are many ways to build and configure a system. Some conform to the highest standards, while others barely meet the minimum requirements. With very little effort, you can determine whether your system had been adequately configured to suit your needs.

High Availability

As the name implies, High Availability is a system or network that is operational, or available, with a high degree of certainty and frequency. Ceryx, a Hosted Exchange provider, has made high-availability one of their primary focuses. With data centers in New York and Toronto, they have developed various technologies to replicate all messaging data in real-time and can fail over to the secondary facility in the event of catastrophe, allowing them to provide a real 100% SLA. While most providers tend to choose between high availability and high performance, all of Ceryx’s Microsoft Exchange deployments have been built to meet the highest standard of availability uptime without sacrificing performance.

One benchmark for testing an application provider’s performance is to log in to the webmail application and switch from the email view to the calendar view. Pick a folder with lots of messages in it and try sorting by “sender” and then clicking through the various pages. If there is a noticeable delay between these actions then your application provider’s performance may not be adequate.

A system’s availability is determined by numerous factors, each of which is examined below.

Architecture

Delays are often a result of high server RPC latency. RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, is how the Outlook client or the Outlook Web Access client (OWA) communicates with the Exchanger servers. RPC latency refers to the delay between initiating a request and its completion. RPC latency, as seen from the client, is a combination of networking latency and server latency. For good performance, the Microsoft guideline is 50ms average latency on the mailbox servers.[4] If mailbox server RPC latency averages much higher than this, the desktop user can experience “pop-ups” and warnings about problems with the connection from Outlook to the Exchange server. In the background, inbound and outbound email is not being processed as the system tries to catch up with other requests. Excessive “pop-ups” can become more than just an irritant; they can slow down a PC to the point of being unusable while Outlook tries to establish a connection to the server.

Ceryx aims to maintain an RPC rate 20ms or less. To do this, they have avoided the tendency of many providers who built their systems with less expensive virtualized environments and network attached storage. Instead Ceryx has invested in server clusters and high-end SANs (Storage Area Networks) at each of their data centers. SANs provide disk access performance, as well as redundancy through RAID configurations and fibre channel connectivity to the mailbox servers.

Many providers, in an effort to reduce costs, combine the Client Access Server and the Hub Transport Server (servers used to facilitate email delivery) on a single physical machine. This dual role can introduce latency at times of peak usage and throttle the ability to handle large outbound mail queues. Ceryx has engineered the Hub Transport role to ensure message queues can be quickly cleared even during periods of heavy load. By combining multiple, dedicated physical Hub Transport servers with the built-in round-robin load balancing capabilities of Exchange 2007, messages are quickly distributed to their destination on the internet. For legitimate email, hardware load balancing is used to ensure optimal performance of the critical Hub Transport role, which processes every single message that passes through the system.

Monitoring

Most hardware load balancing configurations can achieve both high performance and high availability; however, to sustain high performance and high availability – with a dynamic system like a Hosted Exchange deployment, where usage and load can vary dramatically – you must have an advanced monitoring system and the processes in place to scale the system in response to constantly changing variables.

Some providers install generic monitoring packages that tend to monitor every single metric available, whether the metrics provide meaningful insight to system performance or not. With Ceryx, every aspect of the environment from key metrics around SAN queue length through to standard metrics like CPU utilization and memory usage are closely monitored, trended, and understood. This information is used to develop highly accurate forecasting and scheduled system scaling. Any provider who has not invested in such monitoring tools and resources will just react to spikes in usage and load. Ceryx plans for them.

Breathing Room

Another major reason for email delays and poor performance can again be attributed to basic economics. A “store” is the unique databases for storing messaging data. With Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise, there is a limit of 50 stores per server, with a Microsoft recommended limit of 200 GB for each store. Some providers will try to maximize the number of customers they can support by pushing these limits. Ceryx does the opposite. Ceryx maintains a maximum of 50 GB per store – one quarter of the maximum – in order to deliver the best raw database performance and protect against data corruption, common with larger stores. With these hard restrictions in place, it’s difficult to imagine how some providers – who offer mailboxes up to 4GB – are able to run a sustainable business and maintain high performance and availability.

IOPS

Economics may also drive another cause of poor performance: IOPS, a measurement of the number of times data can be written and read to disk per second, can vary widely per system. With Microsoft Exchange, IOPS capacity is directly related to performance and a heavy user can use up to 1 IOPS under certain circumstances. Each disk has a maximum number of IOPS it can support, so a careful ratio of users per array of disks is essential to maintain decent performance.

Ceryx is careful to maintain a generous ratio of IOPS per user based on real-world metrics monitored from its large user base, taking into consideration peak activities times and not just daily averages.

Routing Issues

To be fair, email delays and errors may occur outside your environment. In the scenario where your colleague was eagerly sitting and waiting for an email to arrive, it may have got stuck somewhere “in the cloud” – somewhere in between both of your email environments.

On a pre-sales and support level, Ceryx has developed a number of troubleshooting tools to help identify potential routing issues. As with any application “hosted in the cloud,” bandwidth is an important consideration when trying to ensure a positive end-users experience. Microsoft Exchange, which consumes 3 KB of a client’s internet connection per active user, is no different. Ceryx has developed a tool that simulates a series of network connections to determine if the client has adequate bandwidth to support their user base. Through this exercise they have discovered that – with any client moving from an on-premise environment to a hosted environment – any increase in bandwidth required is partially offset by decommissioning and offloading SMTP traffic, external connections spam traffic and attacks.

Spam/Anti-Virus

Of course the most notorious place a message gets “stuck” or delayed is in a provider’s anti-virus and spam filtering system. Ceryx runs seven different anti-virus products in its environment to ensure system health and email hygiene. That level of protection could potentially cripple an ordinary system that wasn’t built for high performance; however, Ceryx has not only sized their solution with the performance hit associated with anti-virus scanning in mind, but also closely monitors its environment to ensure email delivery is never compromised by spam and anti-virus filtering.

Beware of any provider who either ignores this potential performance hit or, worse yet, removes backend anti-virus all together. Removing anti-virus may appear to be a good way to control costs, as high-end solutions can be very expensive, but removing them allows viruses in, and once in, are often hard to then find, never mind remove. Ceryx’s system scans incoming and outgoing messages as well as messages in the store on a scheduled basis. A regular scan of mailbox databases is just as important as gateway anti-virus to reduce the instance of catastrophic failure.

Mobility

The benefits and usability of the Ceryx architecture can be measured not only on the desktop level but for mobile users as well, who share the same highly optimized and redundant environment. Ceryx also maintains fully-replicated BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) in both its environments to maintain maximum mobility uptime as well. Forum Oilfield Services, out of Houston Texas, currently has 600 employees using the Ceryx Hosted Exchange solution, with almost 100 mobile users.

Beware of “Bargains”

Unfortunately the market is crowded with Hosted Exchange providers who are not as concerned about delivering a dependable and resilient solution as they are about keeping their costs low and selling high volumes of mailboxes. Providers that offer 3 or 4 GB mailboxes are ignoring the commonly held understanding that mailboxes of this size do not perform well and are highly susceptible to data corruption. That corruption is not limited to just the user in question, but can impact all users on that store, potentially even the entire server.

These providers can only offer mailboxes of this size at a bargain price if they compromise on some other expense – dedicated servers, SANs, anti-virus solutions or a fully redundant architecture. Of course the much greater expense is the lost productivity and opportunity that results from using a solution that was designed with the primary goal of meeting the lowest possible price point to compete with free solutions in the market, and not delivering Enterprise performance and availability.

Ask all potential vendors for the following:

How Do You Measure Up?

A lost or delayed email could be viewed as a nuisance or as a warning. Purchasing decisions need to be fiscally responsible, but often, seemingly bargain solutions can have a devastating and costly effect in the long run.

So how does your system measure up? Using Ceryx as a control, measure the speed, versatility, and resilience of your system.

CeryxSLA: 100%Latency: < 20 msGB / Store: 50 GB / StoreIOPS per User: HighBandwidth Sizing Tools: YesSpam / Anti-Virus: Gateway + Mailbox Server, IntegratedMobile Device Access: Redundant BlackBerry, ActiveSync Ceryx customers share the belief that their data is their companies most valued asset. As the most used collaboration tool in business, an individual Microsoft Exchange account typically contains a blueprint of an employee's tenure: their schedule, correspondence (and commitments), contacts, contracts and much more. Ceryx customers trust that this real-time journal is safe, available and always accessible. Footnotes:[1] The Wav Group: Gaining an Edge in Real Estate with Smartphones http://wavgroup.com [2] The Open Press: http://www.theopenpress.com/index.php?a=press&id=42004[3] Apple Support Forum: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1953[4] Microsoft Exchange Team Blog: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/09/28/411674.aspx[5] Microsoft TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738147.aspx

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Running Blindly Behind Google – Is That An Ultimate Seo Goal?

admin    Google Optimization     Behind, Blindly, Goal, google, Running, Ultimate

Google is the lord of websites, there is no any doubt about it. Every one is running behind Google for a moment when Google turns back and looks at them. This is the evil going on in the web world. Building a website must have an objective to satisfy the website visitors rather than Google. If your website is liked by all then Google cannot ignore it. After all, even Google is running behind visitors to satisfy them.If your website has a good content, Google can’t neglect it. Good content here means a valuable and original content that can provide appropriate information for a person who has visited your website with a hope to find it. Google itself wants to satisfy its users by providing relevant search results so how can it ignore your website when it is liked by all. Therefore, while building a website always give first priority to your intended visitors.Google is just a medium to pull visitors to your website. There are several other ways through which you can bring thousands of visitors to your website. Some of the ways include: writing your website URL in the wall of your house with a pencil, stamping a website URL in Paper notes, wearing a website URL printed t-shirts. You may be surprised to know even the Google used similar techniques to attract a huge audience. But only attracting visitors doesn’t mean success. Can you imagine Google to be the world’s largest brand without some extraordinary qualities? It has quality to serve people by showing the most relevant resources available on the net. With this quality, people liked Google, and it is a lord today.As for Google in its beginning days, it’s better for you to focus on quality of a website and make it user-friendly as much as possible. Saying this, I am not suggesting you to avoid Google but it mustn’t your primary focus. Google is an excellent destination for all but why don’t you try making your own website the destination for Google.Many webmasters are wasting their valuable time just to see one more green bar in a PageRank box of Google Toolbar and for getting listed in first page of Google Search Result Page but most of them are unsuccessful on doing so. If that time was spent for the modification of their website then there would be something more they could contribute to the world. Your intension of running behind Google will always keep you back but if you think of running your website yourself individually then the day will come when Google runs after you to get inside the frame of your eyes for a single sight of yours.Up to this day, Google is successful because it is running independently. It didn’t pray any one for its website’s promotion. Be careful, promoting a website with dirty tricks may cause a demotion of the website which can never be promoted again. You must not promote your website for getting Google’s eye but for dragging more visitors to your website. Aren’t you being blind by running foolishly behind Google? Think once, are you correctly knowing the value of website promotion and the value of website search engines?

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The Truth Behind the Web Marketing Growth – Looking Beyond the Numbers

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Behind, Beyond, Growth, Looking, marketing, Numbers, Truth

 

Although it may appear to be incredible for may, a statement issued by the lead generation firm Clash-Media claims that over 50 per cent of a typical marketer’s funds are now spent on online promotions. This startling revelation came to the fore following the release of the firm’s “Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2008” conducted in May this year in association with E-consultancy.

However, many feel that the release may be a misinterpretation of the survey report.

The report states that the survey respondents confirmed that a large part of the funds meant for lead generation is being spent on online marketing. According to them, while 53 per cent of the funds are spent on online promotions, 43 per cent is used up for offline promotions.

I personally believe that the study’s approach appears to substantiate the view.

According to the release, 73 per cent of the people who were surveyed confirmed that they patronised ‘online or multi-channel’ routes to promote their services and products. In comparison, 23 per cent of the respondents said that they utilised the online channel and the remaining four per cent relied only on offline promotions.

This goes on to establish that most of the persons surveyed mainly concentrated their marketing promotions through online channels. I found that the additional part of the abstract provided with the report was more precise. Following are the conclusions of the report issued by Clash Media:

Hence, it may be concluded that the online marketing spending that has been witnessing a spectacular growth in the US will continue. And experts predict thay the double-digit growth rate is expected to continue for many years from now.

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Apple Stores: The Truth Behind The Apple Logic Board Issue

admin    Misc     Apple, Behind, Board, Issue, Logic, Stores, Truth

Who pays for the lavish locations the apple store provides? The consumer, that is who! We have started a campaign to shed some light on why apple computer repairs are so expensive! We are a family run apple service center. We were attacked by apple, because of the current issues with their computers. The logic boards have an inherent defect. We saw many school kids, upset because their laptop was malfunctioning. Apple accused us of lying and said there was a software not a hardware issue. Since we were correct, we went out and spent $100,000.00 on the proper equipment to do logic board repairs. Like clockwork we get sent apple computers to fix that the apple stores has said needed a refurbished g5 apple logic board! We fix these for 250 dollars FLAT RATE and include insurance on the return shipping. Last I checked it was at least $600.00 JUST FOR THE REFURBISHED APPLE MOTHER BOARD! How can we provide this price point and superior service and turn around? Honestly, because we care about your computer and your budget. Apple, well just like any large corporation, only cares about the stock holders bottom line. That is profits. We do not have stock holders to please! I know you are not happy with the price quoted by the apple stores to you! I would not be either. There is no worries though because I am here to help alleviate the stress of handing apple about $1000.00 to get that perfectly fine computer you have fixed. We don’t want the apple stores to pressure you into buying a new computer. We want you to save hundreds on the apple store price! When you add to that, the fact we are usually 3 times as fast as the apple stores turn around. Well the bargain is very clear to see. That is, for those who are looking for one! I hope I have helped you make a proper choice here. Our tech has over 20 years of experience working with apple computers and doing repairs on apple products. He was certified in the late 1980’s! You really need to put that experience to work for you. Leverage that experience to save TIME and Money! We really understand that you have a budget and we average a 99% fix it rate. It is actually more than 99% but we don’t like to exaggerate! If we cannot fix it within the 250.00 flat rate, We will ship it back at no cost. That has yet to happen… If given some time, we can find a used board and actually replace the faulty g5 imac logic board in the machine! What we currently offer for 250.00 is an actual refurbishment of the board in your machine. A service the apple stores cannot provide for you. We look forward to helping save you money soon! I hope this has been educational for you! Click the links below for our website.

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Leave Your Competition Behind with an SEM Specialist

admin    Website Design Resources     Behind, Competition, Leave, Specialist

An SEM specialist specializes in driving targeted traffic and high placement in search engine rankings. They bring into play a number of strategic angles to expand visibility and traffic to a businesses website. The amount of existing strategies are sizeable so it’s a good idea to pick out the ones largely beneficial to your individual venture.Methods needed will often vary according to the services or products provided by the site. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) calls for large amounts time and energy for the normal business owner. After all, this is not the area in which the untrained person has all the skills needed to see to all the assorted responsibilities involved that it takes to get a website in the numero uno position of the search results. And even if a person understands the variety of skills required, they in all probability don’t have the time that’s necessary to devote for best results.

SEM specialists are experts in giving you a competitive edge and attaining targeted traffic. They utilize special strategies that get the businesses website in front of buyers and ranking highly in search engines. These strategies mix in SEO, SEM and other assortments of methods to get results. Maintaining a website ranked well within the search engines is never a finished task, but once the weight of the work is completed and the site is ranking on the first page, it’s really a matter of preservation on the business owners’ side. Of course, the maintenance can also be well monitored and maintained by an SEM specialist.

As soon as an SEM Specialist goes to work, they will first find out which keywords are important to aim for within the business owners niche. Once this information is decided on, it is then time to get the website itself optimized for these keywords. After the site has been optimized accurately, they move to SEM. Now the magic can take place. If done correctly, it can produce effective results. Pulling a tsunami of traffic to a businesses website is the whole intention in having a website in the first place. However to pull off these results, it requires optimization methods and skills.

If your website isn’t getting the traffic you want, SEM specialists are virtually a necessary asset. With their knowledge, it may well mean the differentiation in a website that never gets any attention at all, to a website that attracts lots of traffic day by day. If a businesses is going contend with its competitors, it has to implement an online business plan.

SEM Specialists possess skills that require extensive amounts of time and focus to obtain. It requires a certain appetite to achieve these skills. For the most part, SEM Specialists are incredibly passionate about their specialty and love a sound challenge. Attaining results is what they are focused on. Implementing the variety of tricks they have perfected, they will acquire results. And it can be very electrifying to watch the advancement while it unfolds. Online businesses ought to guarantee they induce a largely visible online presence.

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Web Design Services in India: the Reasons Behind Being the Best in the World

admin    Custom Web Design     Behind, Being, Best, design, India, Reasons, Services, World

With India emerging as the most preferred destination for outsourcing web design services, Western countries, especially the United States, UK and Canada are hiring professional Indian web designers for flawless services. There are many web designing companies in India that have excelled in gaining confidence and trust of international businesses. There are many advantages of outsourcing web design India:

The quality standard maintained by web designing companies India is of top quality. Most Indian web designing firms follow the standards laid by ISO and CMM boards.

India boasts many web development companies that offer website designing, content management, logo designing, flash designing, graphic designing and ecommerce web solutions under one roof! This enables enterprises to meet their online needs.

Web design India is very cost effective. Designers create customized web designs, which are cost effective in comparison to other countries. Moreover, India boasts a high number of well-trained IT professionals who provide honest services on a part-time or full-time basis.

While outsourcing web designing services you must know some basic aspects of an accessible and user-friendly website. The appearance of a website must be simple and should not stress on excessive gadgetry or design. Just look at Google or Orkut and you will understand the impact it has on surfers.

There are many websites created for a specific purpose. Some are just for offering information while others are designed to sell products and services. But the purpose can only be achieved if visitors can easily access information and products. So, usability and accessibility are important factors of a website. If you have an ecommerce site with a host of products, ensure each product includes a brief summary besides the shopping cart details. This will help visitors to get informed more about your products. Web design in India can provide customizable websites, as per your choice and preferences.

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