A new Storage white paper from the TechCenter, “Cost-Effective Gigabyte Exchange Mailboxes with Dell PowerVault Storage,” by Dave Jaffe and Todd Muirhead, is available here. Please use "Threads" below to discuss. Here are the highlights:

To prove out the merits of Dell™ PowerVault™ direct attach storage with Microsoft® Exchange 2007 CCR (cluster continuous replication), we built out 2,000 1 GB mailboxes on two PowerEdge™ 2950 servers representing the active and passive nodes of an Exchange 2007 CCR cluster, using four direct attach MD1000 disk arrays on each. Here's what that looked like:




On the disk array attached to the active node we built 12 storage groups and Exchange databases and used Load Generator 2007 to populate them for 2,000 users. Each user's mailbox was inflated to 1 GB by adding 20,000 items to their inbox:

LUN	Disks	Size	Storage Groups	Mailboxes per Storage Group
M	10	1.19 TB	1	175
			2	175
N	10	1.19 TB	3	175
			4	175
O	10	1.19 TB	5	175
			6	175
P	10	1.19 TB	7	175
			8	175
Q	10	1.19 TB	9	175
			10	175
R	7	816 GB	11	125
			12	125
Global hot spare	1	-	-	-

The CCR works by shipping transaction log files from the active node to the passive node, thus all user data built on the active node will end up on the passive node as well.

Finally, we ran an eight-hour Loadgen test against the 2,000 users. Here's the result:

Metric	Result
Test length	8 hours
Number of Tasks	94,160
Number of Tasks Skipped	0
Exchange SendMail latency	0.138 sec
Exchange SendMail 95th Percentile Latency	0.360 sec
Data Transferred to Active Node During Run	9.2 GB

As you can see, the Exchange 2007 cluster built on PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage was able to handle this large number of large mailboxes with very low response times!