Fast, Reliable, Low-Cost Storage for Exchange Server 2007 with Emprise™ 5000

If you are one of the millions of Microsoft® Exchange Server users, you know how critical this messaging platform is to your organization's ability to do business in today's 24x7 world. Uninterrupted and efficient access to email and other messaging data is essential—downtime can mean millions of dollars of lost revenue and productivity.

You may be considering a storage area network (SAN) for your Exchange Server application and data. If so, you are not alone. For years SANs have been considered the best storage solution for this critical application. However, some SANs actually can become a single point of failure—while slowing performance and significantly increasing the cost of your Exchange environment. With the introduction of high-avail- ability features, Microsoft now recommends using direct-attached storage (DAS) with Exchange Server 2007—for faster performance, higher availability, and lower costs.

Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP)

Emprise 5000 with Exchange 2007

Xiotech's Emprise™ 5000 storage system, built on patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE™) technology, is a perfect DAS solution for your Exchange environment. It delivers the fast performance, high availability, and easy scalability you require, along with a very low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Fast Performance

Using a dedicated DAS system for Exchange data enables faster response to requests because it eliminates potential I/O contention with other applications.

Emprise 5000 is architected to maximize performance. Unlike SAN systems, Emprise 5000 eliminates storage controllers on the front end and switches on the back—and the bottlenecks that go along with them.

Because Emprise 5000 uses DataPacs rather than individual disk drives, each system provides the processing power of 20 to 40 disk drives in just 3U of rack space. DataPacs are available in a variety of configurations to meet the specific needs of your Exchange Server environment. And performance scales linearly along with capacity. As you add

Highlights

  • Lowest TCO in the industry:
    • 100% usable capacity
    • No drop in performance as capacity utilization increases
    • Industry-leading performance for the price, verified by the Storage Performance Council (SPC)1
    • Efficient use of energy and space
    • Five-year hardware warranty
  • Fast performance:
    • No I/O contention with other applications
    • No bottlenecks from storage controllers or back-end switches
    • Linear performance scale
    • Dense processing power
    • High-performance storage tiers
  • Maximum availability:
    • No disks to replace
    • Self-healing storage technology
    • Fewer components to fail and easier maintenance
    • Fast recovery from node failure with Microsoft CCR
    • Nondisruptive online backup

Maximum Availability

With a simpler design than a SAN, DAS has fewer components that can potentially fail. When combined with the high-availability features of Exchange Server 2007, DAS can actually provide better availability than a SAN. However, DAS systems are not all created equal.

The ISE technology on which Emprise 5000 is built delivers unmatched reliability—from its dual Managed Reliability Controllers to improved vibration and cooling. Its sealed DataPacs also eliminate the need for you to ever touch another disk drive. Preventive capabilities eliminate most disk failures, and self-healing technology fixes disks that do fail, in place, with no downtime. Thanks to this tremendous reliability, Xiotech provides an industry-exclusive five-year hardware warranty with each Emprise 5000 system.

Enhancing Availability with Microsoft CCR

Cluster continuous replication (CCR) is a high-availability feature of Exchange Server 2007 that improves on previous clustering technology by eliminating single points of failure (e.g., the data instance used by the active node). With identical logs and datastores available on separate nodes, the Exchange application and data are protected and can be recovered very quickly in case of failure.

When an active node fails over to a passive node as the result of either planned or unplanned events, the failed node can be repaired and messaging databases reseeded without having to restore data from backups. This is significantly faster than recovering from tape, which means your organization can re-establish email functionality in a fraction of the time it might take in a more traditional "backup-to-tape" strategy.

You also can leverage CCR for more efficient backups. With synchronized copies of data on both nodes, you can back up data from the passive node without affecting users, who maintain nonstop access to the primary node.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

Like most DAS systems, Emprise 5000 is less expensive to deploy and easier to maintain than a SAN.

Unlike typical storage systems, however, Emprise 5000 enables you to use 100 percent of available capacity. And its fast performance—validated by the SPC as leading the industry for the price—does not go down as disk utilization increases. Thus, you can meet your capacity and performance requirements with less disk—dramatically lowering your capital costs. Now you can afford to give end users the larger mailboxes they need to remain productive.

Because your storage is decoupled from your servers, you can easily scale your Exchange environment. When you want more capacity or performance, just add a switch and plug in another Emprise 5000 system or two. You can scale out as far as you like. And the Emprise 5000 system's five-year warranty can save you thousands of dollars over other systems, which generally provide no more than three years of coverage before hefty maintenance fees kick in.

Contact Xiotech today to learn how Emprise 5000 DAS with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 can give you the best performance and reliability—with the lowest TCO.

1Best protected disk array price/performance for SPC-1 I/Os per Second (IOPS); industry-leading price/performance for SPC-2 Megabytes per Second (MBps)—composite mirroring and large file mirroring—as of May 12, 2008. Audited reports are available at: www. storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00064 and www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_ spc2#b00031.