In the typical MS rip and replace methodology
it has been officially
announced that MS Exchange 12
will only be available for 64bit operating systems ( or should that be
system as in singular MS Windows 2003 64bit ). The 64bit version of MS
Exchange has shown IO up to 75% faster when compared to existing Exchange
2003 servers.
And it’s not just the Exchange server
that needs to be ripped and replaced, to get full performance benefits
of the increased IO it’s also recommended that you upgrade your global
catalog server to 64bit also.
So for existing Exchange shops that
have been looking forward to upgrading to Exchange 12 when it’s available
in early 2007 make sure you have plenty of hardware budget also or, of
course, you could just migrate to Lotus Domino 7 today and use what ever
hardware you want for your servers and by the time you do get around to
replacing your hardware with 64bit based processors I’m sure there will
be a 64bit version of Lotus Domino ready to be installed.
Dec's Dom Blog 