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1. How long have you been providing Exchange in a hosted environment?

Many companies will fudge this answer - "We've been in business for 10 years!" "We've been hosting servers for 5 years!" Ask them specifically how long they've been offering Microsoft Exchange in a hosted environment, and stick with it until you get an answer.

Experience counts; like all sophisticated software systems, Exchange has issues that emerge over time, and many of these issues are unique to the hosted environment - which is an order of magnitude more complex than simple one-company on-premises installations. Only time spent with the system and delivery model, sorting through these issues and documenting their causes and fixes, can guarantee that the same problems won't keep cropping up.

Apptix has been hosting customers on Microsoft® Exchange servers since 1997. We've been through three major upgrades (Exchange 2000 in July 2000, Exchange 2003 in March 2004 and now to Exchange 2007 in September 2007) and several significant and important improvements to our own architecture. All of this is part of our goal of continuous improvement.

Conversely, many email hosting providers proudly post the number of users they have, professing to be the largest provider. With so many suppliers stating that they're the "world's largest provider" how do you decide who's telling the truth? Simply ask them how many Exchange users they have. There are different types of email protocol, MAPI and POP among them. MAPI (Microsoft's Messaging Application Programming Interface) is the protocol typically used for communications between Microsoft Outlook client software and Microsoft Exchange server software. This is the only protocol that enables all of the collaborative features of Exchange: shared calendars, public folders, shared tasks, workflow applications, etc.

You can use the other protocols primarily used for internet-based email; however, you do not get the enterprise-level collaboration services like shared calendars, tasks, and public folders that make Exchange such a powerful business productivity tool.

For more information on email protocols, see item #6 below.

2. What's your relationship with Microsoft?

Only a certain group of Microsoft partners are actually certified and licensed to run Hosted Exchange
- they must have a signed Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) to legally provide these services. And to get a SPLA, the company must undergo training of their engineers, evaluation of their systems, and periodic audits of their server and client licenses.

If a provider answers that they're a "Microsoft Certified Partner" or MCP, that's not enough - they don't have the training, experience, or authorization to offer hosted Exchange services. Microsoft often ignored these license pirates in 2004, but in 2005 they began enforcing the terms of their license agreements - potentially leaving YOU on the hook for license payments, or without a service altogether.

Even if a company says they're a "Gold Certified" Microsoft partner, ask them about their certification
- Microsoft offers certification in many different applications, and the company may be "Gold Certified" for Windows or IIS instead of hosted Exchange. (For more details on certification, see question 3, below.)

Mi8 was the very first company in the world to sign a Service Provider Licensing Agreement with Microsoft, and helped Microsoft write the terms of this agreement in 1998. Our services and licenses have been audited by Microsoft, and are fully certified and approved for sale to organizations like yours.

3. What kind of certifications does your company have?

There are several types of "certifications" that hosted Exchange service providers might have. Some are important, some are not so important - but it's important that you know the difference.

Vendor Certifications:

Microsoft Certified Partner: this is the base level of Microsoft partnership. Every single Exchange hosting provider should have this certification, at a minimum. This ensures that they are licensed to sell Microsoft technology - however, as noted above, this does NOT ensure that they are licensed to sell hosted Microsoft Exchange.

Microsoft Certified Gold Partner for Hosting and Application Services: this is the highest level of Microsoft partnership. This ensures that they are licensed to sell hosted Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft offers a Gold level of certification in many different areas, including Exchange, .Net, Windows, and more. Today, the Gold Certification process is based on a complex formula that combines the number of Microsoft Certified Professionals, a number of customer references, some confirmation of the technical expertise of a company, and the volume of Microsoft licenses sold by a company.

Microsoft Exchange Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA): as described above in #2, any Exchange hosting company should have a valid Service Provider Licensing Agreement, or SPLA, with Microsoft. If they don't, they don't have the training, experience, or authorization to offer hosted Exchange services - potentially leaving YOU on the hook for license payments, or without a service altogether, if your service provider is not a SPLA signatory.

Cisco Certification: Cisco offers certification for networks designed around their products. This certification ensures that the initial design and the network management policies meet Cisco's recommendations.

4. What's your basic server configuration? Single servers with redundancy, active/passive clusters, or active/active clusters?

We have completely redesigned our infrastructure in support of Exchange 2007. Our new Apptix OnDemand™ platform was created in a state-of-the-art data center and with the scrutiny and design experience of our expert Apptix engineers to ensure that our customers would benefit from the best Exchange Hosting solution available today.

In Exchange 2007 there are no longer active/active clusters, only active/passive. The important question to ask here is; "What is the ratio of active to passive servers?" The 1-to-1 ratio, such as in our environment, is the most costly setup to construct and deploy, but provides the most redundancy, which in turn provides your business with the most stability and security. In some scenarios a provider may use up to 7 active cluster nodes with a single passive node to back them up. This means that if two of the active nodes fail, there is no backup system in place to fail over to. Although these clusters are more cost effective, they are also a lot more complex to build, run, maintain and especially to rebuild if need be.

If a provider offers to host a server for you, ask them about their setup. Unless you're a company with several thousand users, they're probably offering you a single server with some redundancy, but no clustering to provide a backup system in case of failure of the primary server. Our research shows that it's impossible to deliver more than 98.75% reliability (i.e., 9 hours of downtime per month!) with a single server setup - and when outages occur, they tend to last significantly longer than they would in a clustered server configuration.

A clustered server configuration is a group of servers acting as one system; if one server in the cluster fails, the other servers can take up the load. In active/passive clusters, two or more servers are configured in the cluster but only one is active, and the backup must be activated when needed.

We utilize active/passive clustering in our 2007 servers, enabling us to deliver 99.99% system availability, a first in this market.

5. What kind of storage system do you use?

This is a complex question. There are three types of storage for any Exchange server:

The local disks that store the OS;

The transaction log volume; and

The database volume.

In many cases, Exchange hosting providers use local disks in the server for all of these storage requirements. This is a risky proposition, and is NOT the recommended configuration for highly available storage. Microsoft recommends that the transaction logs and the database volumes be place on SAN's (Storage Area Networks) only to provide for maximum levels of performance.

To deliver high performance, highly available services, a provider should utilize local disks configured in a RAID 1 mirror for the Windows Operating System, and then configure the other two volumes on external storage. The best choice for this would be a highly resilient and redundant SAN.

Apptix uses RAID-1 disk arrays for the local OS disks and the Exchange Transaction logs as well as highly available RAID 1+0 EquaLogic SAN for the Exchange database volume. This setup enables us to deliver maximum reliability, and allows us to perform high-performance system backups on a nightly basis. In addition, this storage configuration allows us to perform Continuous Cluster Replication (CCR), which means that should some kind of error occur to the production Exchange Storage (the logical unit is the Exchange Storage Group) Apptix engineers would be able to fail over to the redundant Exchange Storage very rapidly. With CCR there is no single point of failure. This can mean the difference in minutes of downtime versus hours or days.


6. What protocol do I use to access the servers?

MAPI (Microsoft's Messaging Application Programming Interface) is the protocol typically used for communications between Microsoft Outlook client software and Microsoft Exchange server software. This is the only protocol that enables all of the collaborative features of Exchange: shared calendars, public folders, shared tasks, workflow applications, etc.

Additionally, the two components of this client/server system support other protocols for different situations: POP for email collection over low-bandwidth links; IMAP for public folder access in the same situation and, of course, Outlook Web Access (OWA), which uses the HTTP protocol to reach your mailbox from any web browser.

In the best of all possible worlds, your service provider should support MAPI for standard operations and POP/IMAP for use under specific circumstances. OWA should also be part of every mailbox.

Apptix supports MAPI as the default communications protocol for all of our Exchange Full mailboxes; these mailboxes also support POP/IMAP and OWA.

Finally, many ISPs are blocking a port on their networks (port 135) that is required for standard communications between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. The simplest way around this is to use a feature called "Outlook Anywhere" - make sure you ask if the service provider offers this feature. (Note that this feature requires your users to be running Windows XP/Vista and Outlook 2003/2007.)

7. What kind of backups do you do, and how often?

There are two basic types of backups: incremental backups, and full backups. A full backup is exactly what it sounds like - all information is backed up onto disk or tape. Incremental backups start with a full backup, then each day or week, a backup is made only of the information that has changed since the last backup.

Full backups take longer to perform, which is the reason that many service providers only do full backups on a weekly or monthly basis, and use incremental backups in between. The difference between the two types is primarily in the speed to restoration; with a full backup, only a single set of files is required for restoration. With incremental backups, the original full backup must be restored, then each of the incremental backups is restored, one by one. In an emergency, when services must be restored as quickly as possible, restoration from incremental backups may take hours longer than restoration from a full backup.

We provide full backups of all data in our systems every night, first to disk, and then from disk to tape. This ensures that our first option for restoration is from disk, taking hours off the time required for a restoration. It may take a bit longer to perform these backups, but in the rare cases where restoration is the only option, we'll be able to get you back up and running very quickly.

8. Have you eliminated all single points of failure in your architecture?

IT managers know it's the little things that cause failures. Burnt-out Network Interface Cards, failed fans, broken cables - a $5 part can bring down a multi-million dollar system if each piece isn't configured in a redundant fashion.

All of our servers are fully redundant, from NICs to power supplies to cables; the data center has redundant power, cooling, and separate physical entrances for redundant connectivity to the Internet backbone; and major systems (such as Exchange Servers, SMTP Gateways, storage) are configured with backups that can failover in an emergency.

In the Apptix environment we have gone to great lengths to define what an enterprise hosted exchange system should be. In addition to having the typical redundancies in power, network adapters and infrastructure equipment, we have gone all the way back to the storage for the system. This is the most crucial part of any Exchange system, because the demand for performance, mailbox and public folder functionality and disaster recovery are all based on the storage design. The redundancy built into this new Apptix OnDemand™ platform goes all the way to having redundant SANs per mailbox cluster. To put it simply, each mailbox cluster is writing data to the primary SAN which is being accessed by you, the client, to get your mail. At the same time, the same data is being written to the secondary SAN so that if anything happens to the data in the primary SAN we can fail over to the secondary data source and resume operations.

It is this extra redundancy that we put into the Apptix solution that enables us to provide our customers with a 99.99% SLA. The first SLA of this type in this market.

9. What is the guarantee you provide regarding system availability?

There are several components to a Service Level Agreement (SLA), the guarantee that service providers offer to you regarding the services they'll provide. The most basic is the uptime guarantee, or system availability guarantee. Most providers offer in excess of 99% availability, but there are huge variances in this range. Consider this comparison:

99% availability:      up to 7.5 hours per month downtime

99.5% availability:   up to 3.6 hour per month downtime

99.9% availability:   less than 45 minutes per month downtime

99.99% availability:  less than 5 minutes per month downtime

Generally, these guarantees exclude certain conditions and make provisions for certain maintenance periods on a weekly basis. Be very careful of any SLA that makes provisions for more than 1 hour of scheduled maintenance per week, and make sure that this maintenance window is scheduled at a time convenient to your users.

Additionally, many service providers offer these as "targets," but include no penalties or rebates if they fall below the guaranteed level - essentially rendering the SLA useless. Apptix guarantees 99.99% systems availability on our Exchange Hosting 2007 services on our Apptix OnDemand™ platform. This "4-9's" availability is the first of this type in the industry.

For details, ask your Apptix account manager for a copy of our Exchange Hosting 2007 Master Hosting Services Agreement and SLA.

10. Are all software licenses included?

Most hosted Exchange providers now provide all licenses for their clients, including Windows Server Licenses, Exchange Server Licenses, Exchange Client Access Licenses (CALs), SQL Server Licenses, and Active Directory Licenses. (Only those that are SPLA signatories will also provide you with a fully licensed copy of Outlook for installation on your systems, at no extra charge.) However, there remain a few service providers that are not in compliance with Microsoft regarding their licensing. You should check with your local Microsoft representative to be sure.

Additionally, please see the discussion about Service Provider License Agreements (SPLAs) in section 3, above.

11. What upgrades are included?
 
Most incremental software upgrades and patches are included at no charge by hosted Exchange providers. Some also promise that major upgrades (e.g., Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003) are included in their service.

Note that Microsoft makes no guarantees that license costs will not change with major version upgrades; thus your cost basis may change with upgrades.

Additionally, hosted Exchange vendors who are not SPLA signatories (see section 3 above) may not have a license agreement that enables them to upgrade their server licenses or your Client Access Licenses, including your desktop installations of Outlook.

Apptix includes all incremental upgrades in our standard service, and works closely with Microsoft to determine any change in cost basis for major upgrades. (Note that in the two major upgrades performed by Apptix, from Exchange 5.5 to 2000, and from Exchange 2000 to 2003, there were no changes in price and no charges for upgrades.) Also, Apptix is a Microsoft SPLA signatory, meaning that we get priority access to upgrades, including alpha and beta test versions for deployment and testing in our lab. We also distribute a fully-licensed version of Outlook (2002, 2003) and Entourage (Mac) as part of our service, at no extra charge.

12. What kind of support do you offer?

There are, of course, dozens of detailed questions that can be asked about support: What are the hours of your support operation? Does a live person answer the phone 24x7 or is it beeper support after "normal business hours"? Are they your own employees, or do you outsource support? Where is your support personnel based? What languages do they speak?

All of these are important considerations for any company, but which are most important to you depends on the type of business you operate. You must analyze your own needs in this area to decide which support criteria are important to you.

Apptix strongly believes that expert client support is a key requirement for all companies outsourcing their Exchange environment. Apptix operates a dedicated team of support personnel; they are Apptix employees, and available to all Apptix customer administrators 24x7x365 via phone or email.

Of course, self-support via our online administrative portal is encouraged.