Intel RAID Controller SRCSASRB 500 Mailbox Compatibility Report

Intel® 500 Mailbox Exchange Server 2007 Storage Solution
Intel
®
Server Chassis SC5400 and Server Board S5000PSL
Introduction
5
This document provides information on Intel’s storage solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007,
based the Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) – Storage program*.
*The ESRP – Storage program was developed by Microsoft Corporation to provide a common storage
testing framework for vendors to provide information on its storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange
Server 2007 software. For more details on the Microsoft ESRP – Storage program, please view:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2007/esr
p.mspx.
Disclaimer
This document has been produced independently of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Corporation
expressly disclaims responsibility for, and makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to, the
accuracy of the contents of this document.
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Intel® on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Due to changing market conditions, it should not be
interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Intel, and Intel cannot guarantee the accuracy of any
information presented after the date of publication.
Features
This document describes an Exchange storage solution for 500 users on the Intel® Server Chassis
SC5400 storage system. The tested user profile was 0.50 IOPS per user with a mailbox limit of 250
MB.
Solution Description
The tested solution consists of one Intel® server chassis and server board with an Intel® SRCSASRB
RAID controller and 4 146GB SAS-interface enterprise-class disk drives installed into the 4-drive and
6-drive cages in the Intel® SC5400 system chassis. This configuration includes 5TB of raw capacity.
The Intel® SRCSASRB controller supports SAS and SATA interfaces to disk drives, and can support a
mixture of SAS and SATA interface disk drives.
The ESRP-Storage program focuses on storage solution testing to address performance and reliability
issues with storage design. However, storage is not the only factor to take into consideration when
designing a scale up Exchange solution. Other factors which affect the server scalability are: server
processor utilization, server physical and virtual memory limitations, resource requirements for other
applications, directory and network service latencies, network infrastructure limitations, replication and
recovery requirements, and client usage profiles. All these factors are beyond the scope for ESRP-
Storage. Therefore, the number of mailboxes hosted per server as part of the tested configuration
may not necessarily be viable for some customer deployment.