Please, do not let the incredibly unwieldy moniker this fine device has been saddled with deter you from seeing the beauty that this device is: a Microsoft Exchange appliance created using the innards of the world class HP Proliant server series.

Make no mistake, this is one serious appliance.

It is one of those solutions that when it was announced, you’d look at a colleague and exclaim, “Dammit, that’s an idea I should have thought about!” For Exchange Server architecting, implementation, management, and administration is not a task for the faint of heart. This product greatly simplifies that pain.

The base E5000 starts out with a single Intel Xeon E5503 up to 12 GB RAM per server blade, and 12 TB of SAS storage. This goes up to dual quad-core Xeons, 48 GB of RAM per server blade, and 80 TB of storage, which is enough for 3,000 2.5 GB mailboxes.

All this in a pre-configured system running Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 on Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition.

Highly recommended!