Zimbra7 vs. Exchange2010
Zimbra7 vs. Exchange2010
Zimbra7 vs. Exchange2010
0
January 2011
Confidential
2009 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Agenda
Executive Summary
Highlights of Exchange 2010 vs. 2007 Exchange 2010 vs. ZCS 7.0
Detailed Comparison
Scalability, reliability and high-availability Integration and customization Platform support and client access Messaging and Collaboration Administration, Security and TCO
Confidential
Zimbras Position
OWA premium still does not work with Safari/Windows or Chrome/Mac & there is no feature parity for Outlook/Mac. Zimbra has a rich web & offline client across multiple platforms MSFT removed single-instance storage (SIS), increasing the size of the database, and does not have tiered storage. Zimbra has SIS & hierarchical storage management (HSM) to optimize storage costs & has different deployment options for maximum flexibility
Scalability
Improvements in Exchange Store reduces I/O footprint so cheaper storage can be used. Each mailbox server can now support many more users
High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Exchange 2010 simplified administration of HA by replacing multiple HA solutions in Exchange 2007 with one solution - Data Availability Groups (DAGs)
DAG ONLY provides HA for mailbox databases, so DAG needs to be augmented with other redundancy & HA technologies for Exchange to have complete HA & redundancy. Zimbra with VMwares SRM is proven to be a complete and scalable HA/DR solution
Using RBAC is a huge shift for Exchange whereas Zimbra has been using RBAC in many large scale implementations
Security
3
TCO
X Expensive license, maintenance & support and requires more administrative time than Zimbra X Any non-Microsoft platform is considered a second-class citizen and continues to lag in feature parity and support
Multi-platform Support
Confidential
Confidential
Email Calendar Address Book & Contacts Tasks Documents & File Share Web Client Desktop/Offline Client Mobile Access
Need to purchase SharePoint
Re-branding
Third-party Integration
Confidential
Platform Architecture
Core architecture Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) is over 20 years old and is Modular architecture that offers nextnot modular e.g. .edb file contains both generation features and proven web metadata and message data so cannot scalability tune and optimize separately Message metadata is separate from the Database availability group (DAG) uses message data so the individual data some components of Windows Failover stores can be tuned and optimized Clustering but this new architecture needs individually to be proven in large scale deployments MSFT continues to debate migrating from ZCS leverages more robust underlying ESE to SQL Server operating environment (Linux based) & proven open source software components Robustness of architectural changes needs to be proven. Exchange historically Uptime is measured in YEARS not weeks had on average 4 hours of downtime per Happy Zimbra admin for almost 3 years 1 month now 767 days uptime on my server! 2 Exchange still does not have tiered storage so it is more costly to scale user storage on Exchange than on Zimbra DAG ONLY provides high availability for Exchange Mailbox not for the entire Exchange infrastructure DAG is new so there is a learning curve & it can only be applied to Exchange ZCS has tiered storage & can cost effectively scale to millions of users with 10+ GB size mailboxes ZCS with SRM is proven to be a complete, scalable and effective high availability (HA) & disaster recovery (DR) solution Most companies will also want to leverage existing and app agnostic HA/DR solution
Platform Scalability
Radicati
Nustats Confidential
Platform Extensibility
Microsoft recommends using Exchanges Rich SOAP API for server access proprietary shell commands Web services framework for client SOAP API has limited server access access and Web Mash-ups framework Outlook add-ins are difficult to support (Zimlets) to integrate 3rd party enterprise and develop and OWA cannot be apps extended Microsoft proprietary platform cannot change or extend the platform & APIs Open source code including sample Zimlets
Platform openness
Limited SOAP support Supports open standard protocols such as SOAP, REST, CalDAV, CardDAV, ICS DOES NOT support open standards such feeds etc as REST, CalDAV, CardDAV and ICS feeds
Rebranding
OWA 2010 has only a SINGLE theme (unlike OWA 2007 which lets administrators define themes) so users cannot switch between themes and if the Complete rebranding of web-clients default theme is changed, the changes will be overwritten with an Exchange rollup or service pack
Confidential
ZCS 7.0
Rich Ajax and HTML web-client access is supported on multiple browsers and platforms; IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome with Windows, Mac or Linux desktops Ajax web-client has complete feature parity with Zimbra desktop client
Mac Desktop
NO Outlook client for Mac (targeted for end of 2010) and it will not have feature Zimbra Desktop client is supported on parity Mac OS and has complete feature parity with Ajax web client Entourage does not have feature parity & difficult to backup NO Outlook client for Linux Exchange Server is not available for Linux Zimbra Desktop client is supported on Linux and has complete feature parity with the Ajax web client ZCS is supported on Linux Servers
Sadly there is a pretty big weak link in Office 2011 [for Mac]: Outlook. It seems that Microsoft simply sacrificed brains for beauty.
3
Confidential
ZCS 7.0
Briefcase in ZCS, allows users of both the web and desktop client to upload and share files in the mail store, including versioning and check-in and check-out, and to access the files from anywhere Single inbox, Voicemail, VoIP, Twitter and Facebook access (through Mash-ups) for offline and web client Index & search of message subject, body and over 200 different attachment types including MS office attachments Syntactic & visual search options Share mail, calendar and address book folders with internal users AND Share folders with external users (does not have to be a Zimbra user) or make them public
Unified Messaging
10
Confidential
ZCS 7.0
Administration through the web anywhere/anytime, or with SOAP API or command line Zimbra Appliance (virtual appliance) option for an email and collaboration solution in less than 10 minutes
Administration
Security
Exchange has moved to a Role-based access control (RBAC) security model & ZCS already has a stable and proven security it still needs to be proven for example layer using RBAC that is used in many large RC1 had a big security hole where an scale deployments admin could control the AD forest ZCS is integrated with proven Spam Assassin & Clam AV solutions and can also be easily extended to leverage third party solutions Less expensive licensing costs Zimbra Desktop is free Save on storage hardware with hierarchical storage management (HSM) Zimbra has been shown to have 33% less admin with 4X more users Save 50% in TCO (with multiple deployment options: bare-metal, multi-tenant or appliance in public or private cloud)
Exchange offers EHF and in-house antiIntegrated anti-abuse spam/virus solutions at additional costs
Expensive license and support costs Outlook and OWA are additional costs More expensive to scale user storage Only 15-20% reduction of IT admin time over Exchange 2007 4
Microsoft Confidential
11