This page is the wiki home for a whitepaper that describes a study showing that the Dell™ PowerVault™ NX1950 storage array can supply the key storage needs of a 1,000-employee company, including Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage for Microsoft® Exchange and database, and CIFS and NFS file serving. The complete paper with all details is linked and a summary and highlights of the paper are included directly on this page.

Discussion and questions about the paper can be written in the threads area at the bottom of this page.

Dell PowerVault NX1950 Storage for the Small-to-Medium Business

Whitepaper Executive Summary

Combining the capabilities of SAN and NAS, the Dell PowerVault NX1950 Integrated NAS Solution provides both block application data through iSCSI and file data through the CIFS and NFS standards. The NX1950 is available with up to 45 SAS drives and can be configured as a High Availability solution with clustered management servers, delivering storage consolidation for small-to-medium businesses. To demonstrate this, a simulation was performed in which the key data requirements of a 1,000-employee company —e-mail, database, and file serving—were provided by a PowerVault NX1950 over an eight-hour test. The PowerVault NX1950 was able to handle the data for 1,000 heavy Exchange 2007 users, 2.6 million orders entered into a SQL Server® 2005 database, and 133 GB of CIFS and NFS file traffic during the eight-hour test.

Whitepaper Highlights

• Dell PowerVault NX1950 features

Disks Available	15K SAS drives available in 36 GB1, 73 GB, 146 GB or 300 GB 10K SAS drives available in 146 GB or 300 GB
Size (1.75” Rack Units) of HA configuration including MD3000	5U
RAID Cache Size	1 GB
Maximum Number of Disks (including 2 expansion enclosures)	45
List Price as tested (as of 7/30/07; includes 3-year Gold warranty services and remote installation)	$70,987

• Test Setup

• Results

Workload	Total Work in Eight-Hour Simulation	Throughput (MB/s)	Total Transferred (GB)
Exchange 2007	1,000 users, 46,081 tasks	4.1	116
SQL Server 2005	2.6 million orders	4.4	124
CIFS	650 files copied	2.2	61
NFS	674 files copied	2.6	72
Total	-	13.3	373