Though the technological reasons to protect Exchange systems may be self evident, there are quantifiable fiscal reasons to protect these messaging systems as well. The dollar value of any given data-set may be difficult to calculate, but the cost-savings of avoiding even a single Exchange outage can easily be determined. In most organizations, there are at the very least one or two subsets of end-users who cannot continue to work without these systems functioning. Even if these groups might not regularly produce revenue in the form of direct sales or billable engagements, salaries, benefits and fixed costs still accrue during an outage.
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An important argument for the introduction of software managed clusters is that of scale: By constructing the cluster out of commodity compute elements, one can, by simply adding new elements, improve the reliability of the overall system in terms of performance and in availability. The limits to how far such a cluster can be scaled seems to be dependent on the scalability of its management software, which in its core has a collection of distributed algorithms to guarantee the correct operation of the cluster. The complexity of these algorithms makes them a vulnerable component of the system in terms of their impact on the overall scalability of the system.
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