Choosing the right type of hardware is critical to your success with larger implementations of Exchange. With many criteria and solutions to consider, you could waste your days playing a game of guess-the-right-solution. In this drill down, I'll show you what I think is the best solution for setting up Exchange for your corporation. Hardware planning You've done a great deal of architectural planning and have at least a rough idea of how many servers you'll need to create the routing groups you've defined for Exchange 2000. The next step is to decide what type of hardware the servers need. As I discuss server hardware, remember that the suggestions I make are merely guidelines. You'll have to plan for the specific needs of your organisation. Also remember that Windows 2000 tends to be very picky when it comes to hardware. Make sure that any servers you buy conform to the Windows 2000 Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). Within small routing groups, such as a remote office with a few users, you won't do nearly as much planning as you would in a big office or routing group. In a small office, just about any server that meets the recommended hardware requirements will get the job done. In a big office, though, you can either use a few really powerful servers or a lot of lower-end machines. I prefer to use several smaller servers, for two main reasons. First is the issue of future growth. Large, powerful servers are expensive. As the network grows, upper management can often be reluctant to loosen the purse strings enough to let you buy another high-end server. If you've justified the high cost of the first few by boasting about how powerful the new server is and what it can do, when you ask for the money to buy another one, management may wonder why the previous server is inadequate to handle the additional workload. If you go with low-end servers, though, you can tell management up front that you're using a build-as-you-go technique. The servers are cheap (comparatively speaking), and adding more servers as the network grows is no big deal, as long as management understands your approach ahead of time. My second reason for preferring larger numbers of less powerful servers is fault tolerance. Suppose for a moment that your organisation contains 1,000 Exchange users and that all of those user mailboxes are contained on a single server. If the server fails, no one can access his or her mail until the server has been brought back up (which can take awhile). Now suppose that you had taken the small-scale approach and distributed those users among five smaller servers. If one of those servers were to go down, you'd have 200 users without mail access, but the other 800 users would be able to keep working. As I said, though, there's really no right or wrong way to go about buying servers, as long as they're completely compatible with Exchange and Windows. Whether you're buying big or small servers, you must think about four main components: the processor, the memory, the hard disk, and the network connection.