This page will be the wiki home for a white paper that describes a study showing the power of the new Dell™ PowerVault™ MD3000i iSCSI storage array for consolidating internal and direct attach storage from multiple servers. Discussion and questions about this work can be written in the threads area at the bottom of this page.

The white paper is available at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/MD3000i_consolidation.pdf.

A short summary: We attached 5 servers and a backup server to a single MD3000i array with 45 disks and ran a continuous cluster replication (CCR) Exchange 2007 configuration, a Web server, SQL Server, and a file share on those systems. Then we drove all workloads simultaneously for 8 hours, including two backups of the passive Exchange CCR node. You can see the servers and their workloads here:

Server/Workload	Total Work in 8-hour Simulation	Total Transferred (GB)
r3win1955a1 Exchange 2007 active node	500 users, 23832 tasks	42
r3win1955a2 Exchange 2007 passive node	500 users, 23832 tasks, plus 2 backups	82
r3win1955a3 Web Serving	0.77 million orders	61
r3win 1955a4 SQL Server 2005	1.1 million orders	148
r3win1950b CIFS	705 files copied	54
Total	-	387