Bye Bye EBS!

You’ve more than likely heard that Microsoft are ending development of EBS with immediate effect. If you browse to the website you’ll see this

image

(eventually…I got this and the regular product page randomly on each page load)

There is also an an announcement on the official SBS blog

“New IT Trends Bring Change to Mid-Market Product Line

 

This didn’t exactly come as a massive surprise. If you work in the SME market hands up who sold lots of EBS?

When the product was initially announced it sounded like an interesting proposition but I had a few problems making it “fit”

Comparisons to SBS are bound to happen so that’s where I’ll start!

SBS works because it fits really well into a couple of scenarios that met a need for small businesses

New company, first network, first server

Obvious really. New company, buying infrastructure to get started. Decides to do it right from the offset and goes for SBS

Existing company, existing network, first server

A company that’s grown and needs to go from that peer to peer network to their first server

Existing Company, existing network, replacement server

You know the type. They’re using a “beefed up" PC as a central storage area for their files or they have been sold sold a more expensive "big daddy” Windows Server for sharing files and have no other functionality

As a side note Windows Foundation with some hosted services thrown in could easily swap out for SBS depending on the size of the company

So where in comparisons does EBS fit?

That was my problem.

Business that were generally large enough to look at EBS don’t really fit any of the above

New companies generally don’t start out needing to support 50+ users straight away

Existing companies that have grown to that size do so for a reason and they’ve usually made their IT mistakes and got something in that fits well. Usually “big daddy” Windows server but they pay enterprise prices because there isn’t a product specifically for them. Hence the introduction of EBS!

Since most existing companies like this generally have decent enough networks running it’s difficult to justify ripping the whole thing out and starting again.

So the other scenario I see is the businesses reaching the upper limits of SBS

I actually have this exact scenario going on at the moment with one of my clients and have agonised over EBS vs the regular server products

One of the issues I had was with the “Security Server”

image

The client in question had already made investments in protecting themselves at the gateway with a dedicated hardware firewall so had no need for Forefront Threat Management Gateway and were already covered by a message hygiene solution so no need for the Exchange Edge role so what exactly were they going to use this server for?

If you are doing it the traditional way then it’s a whole physical server you just don’t need. Obviously you could virtualise it but it’s 🙂

The following two tabs change content below.
Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. Formerly, coordinator of AMITPRO and Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

Latest posts by Andy Parkes (see all)

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.