Here are few of the questions we discuss in this edition.  Hit up the video to get the full conversation.

Is Encryption the silver bullet to provide a secure and private service?

What are the physical containers and logical boundaries to reduce risk in the service?

How does the service employ the concept of "functional boundaries"?

How does the concept of “searchable encryption” work with the service?

Does the concept of a customer controlled encryption key really reduce risk in a service?

What features does the service provide enabling to reduce a customer risk?

You can expect to see the frequency of posts return to normal on the blog.  Additionally I want to remind you that MEC 2014 is less than 7 weeks away.  I will be part of the MEC experience and I invite you to join me in Austin, TX.  Go to https://iammec.com to register today. 

-Perry

In principle that means that there should be opportunities to redesign systems to take advantage of the changing ratios.  In this video we look at a pretty cool example where the design of Exchange Server 2013 does exactly that.  Specifically, how we used some extra storage to reduce a bunch of redundant calculations to reduce the TCO of the system by changing the way we perform indexing operations in Exchange.

A couple of side points:

1)  In previous releases, the TCO of the system was lower because the space savings were worth the extra calculation time.  It is only now that these 'wasted' calculations are a net loss. 

2)  The TCO win is enabled not just by lower disk storage costs but also by a replication based backup/data protection paradigm.  Without the investment in Exchange HA this approach would probably still not be a net TCO win.

The changes to search are not just about TCO changes. With the change to the underlying search engine, search is faster, there are new user experiences, as well as new features which enable eDiscovery across Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. Related to the eDiscovery improvements there are also new in-place hold improvements which enable you to specify which items to hold by using query parameters such as keywords, senders and recipients, start and end dates, as well as specifying a duration for items on hold.

Keep watching and let me know if you have questions, or other topics you want me to talk about.

- Perry

To kick things off this new video is a fairly high level overview of some of the core design changes in the product. This video is  a little longer than usual but it’s got a huge amount of good information. Here are some of the things we are particularly excited about:

• Dramatically simplified network story that eliminates the need for complex, expensive load balancers that can maintain session affinity;
• Ability to deploy a flat worldwide namespace;
• Reduction in the required roles and hardware configurations to deploy Exchange;
• New approach to monitoring and automatic service restoration that makes sure on-premises customers benefit from all the work the Exchange team has been doing to make our own service highly reliable with very few alerts required to humans.
  

MEC is only a few days away, and I’ll be explaining more about why we build Exchange during my day 2 keynote.  Do you have an Exchange question you want me to answer? Email askperry@microsoft.com or tweet your question using the #askperry and #MECisback tags!

And some bonus information …… One of the interesting things about this release is that it represents the culmination of a 3 release path we started down when we planned Exchange 2007 way back nearly a decade ago.  If you are interested, here is a video that was filmed a while ago but was put on ice since we couldn’t talk about the new version of Exchange until we released the preview …..  

See you at MEC!

Perry

If by chance haven’t seen my conversation on RBAC, it might be good to check it out here first. Also this link to the Office 365 Trust Center is great background.

- Perry

Starting with Exchange 2007 SP2 moving forward, administrators can create long running move jobs for load balancing, migrating between versions, replacing and upgrading hardware and for making the jump to the cloud.  The architecture and approach will remain consistent for all current versions of on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online and for all the upcoming versions we have even glimmers of planning for. 

Moving mailboxes is a key part of managing an email service for the long-haul.  There will be updated technologies, new business priorities, mergers, acquisitions, hardware and version upgrades.  So having a robust, fire and forget, throttled system that enables administrators to accomplish this work while keeping the moves transparent to actual users (by making sure they stay on-line throughout the process) is absolutely key and making sure that the process scales up gracefully as mailboxes move from Gigabytes to 10’s of GB to 100’s.

I was amused recently to find out that one of our cloud competitors is trumpeting the benefits of their simple cloud story, by pointing out how happy users were with their ‘Fresh and Clean’ mailboxes after the ‘migration’.  By fresh and clean they meant empty.  This awesome and simple ‘migration’ simply creates new mailboxes and simply orphans the data in the original.  If providing a service that makes sure that email doesn’t get lost and is available to users every day makes sense, then our perspective is that it is also important to keep user’s mail intact as they move to the cloud.

- Perry

The short answer is an emphatic no; not only do you get a great immutability story, but you get one that provides more finely-tuned control over the content that you decide to make immutable. The slightly longer answer about how this works and how Exchange provides built-in immutability policies that allows companies to comply with important regulations and internal is in the video. If you want more detailed whitepapers on the subject please see here.

You may have also seen that we recently released PST Capture – this is another step in putting your rogue .pst files onto Exchange where you can get control of them and start treating that data with the same immutability story.

It was suggested to me that I provide some more information on a few specific things I talk about in the video. So talking about Documents, I of course meant any email or attachment or other item that you happen to have stored in your Exchange Mailbox. Also, when I talk about ‘’Dumpster 2.0” that really is only the internal name for our retention hold functionality and ‘officially’ it is called the Recoverable Items Folder.

I also made a reference to copy-on-write - for those that are interested, copy-on-write is a term that references an approach to handling modifying content without destroying the original content and involves making a copy of an item before writing. In Exchange, when the user wants to modify a message or other piece of content that is marked for retention hold (immutable) the server first makes a copy of the message then moves the original to the Dum…The Recoverable Items Folder and then makes the modifications to the copy.

I'm always interested in any comments you have on Immutability, Archiving or other Exchange topics you want me to talk about.

- Perry

The video covers few different areas - Time Averaging, Efficient Data Centers, User Profiles and how the things we’ve learnt from the service can help customers who are running their Exchange system on-premises. One additional thing that we didn’t get a chance to talk about, which also helps reduce costs dramatically, is the benefit we get from using PowerShell to automate almost every aspect of our deployment, monitoring and management of the service.  Since people costs can be a large part of deployment and management costs, this automation enable us to streamline our operations and are very important to the economics of the service.

As well as the cost aspects, we talk about some of the Green aspects of running a datacenter, and if you want more information about this, take a look here: https://blogs.technet.com/b/msdatacenters/

Oh, and just to clarify the part of the video when I talked about paying attention to the profile of the users in the service - I was only talking about the statistical aspects of the aggregate load.  We don't look at what a particular person or organization is doing, nor do we read their mail! That would be invading people's privacy which we don't do.  The Office 365 Trust Center has more details about how we think about this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/trust-center.aspx

Want to know more about how we built Exchange? Use the comments section to send me your thoughts, ideas and questions.

-Perry

One of the things that was very important for the shift that we talk about is that component teams (usually about 6 devs, plus testers and Program Managers) are responsible for the monitoring of their component as part of their product work and deciding which alerts from their monitors should be pageable and for handling the paging alerts unmediated by any other humans on an operations team.  This model of operating keeps the team closely engaged with the service, keeps us learning and helps us to keep improving the service.

While the model provides great benefits for our service customers in terms of availability, and ongoing improvements to the service, it also has some positive effects on the team. Interestingly, the component teams across Exchange that have had the most active engagement with the service (and consequently the most on-call load) have the best morale.  My personal theory is that the sense of satisfaction from seeing such direct impact from your work is the key driver for the improved morale of the team.  The change in culture and how we think about customers is captured in a recent video with the team:

Want to know more about how things work in Exchange? – post a comment, ask a question!

Perry

Turns out that it was highly fortuitous that it was Matt who was in the office at the time since many of the questions were about Exchange 2010 High Availability (HA).  So, we this turned into a great opportunity to get answers directly from one of the key individuals behind our HA investments.  Some people might think this was all too convenient perhaps even staged.  All I can say is that the world would be simpler with a little less cynicism. 

Thanks to Martin, Eamon, Mitch, Doug and Matt who took the time out to record questions. Keep posting those comments and asking me the questions you want answers to.

- Perry

The conversation this time is centered on the framework through which we have tackled the challenges of making sure that we can deliver a highly reliable service. In this video, I cover some of the areas the Exchange team has focused on as our responsibilities have evolved from selling on-premises software to also encompass managing a service.

The most interesting aspect, is the extra focus that is applied to making sure that the isolation models in the service are well thought through.  On-premises scenarios provide isolation for free since each company's deployment is very heavily isolated from every other one.  To get efficiencies of scale, cloud services create the risk of tightly coupling the whole deployment so that one mistake or design flaw can cause failure for millions of customers.

In thinking through isolation we  look at the important usage scenarios or resources within the service and try to identify a coherent set of nested isolation levels.  To randomly pick a case, say storage, there are a lot of isolation levels that have meaningful levels of isolation that are brought to the table.  Specifically, the Exchange service relies on a number of different layers of strictly nested isolation. For example: messages, mailboxes, database, server, database availability group and forest.  In addition there are is datacenter and regional isolation layers that help but aren't in a strict hierarchy with the core layers. 

This talk is centered on the framework or philosophy by which we think through our designs for reliability and availability.  In future blog postings I think it would be interesting to work through some examples or case studies of these scenarios.  Please let me know if there are any particular areas that would be of interest.

- Perry