Maximizing Efficiency with Exchange 2010 on Dell Servers and Storage

We compared a typical 10,000-mailbox Microsoft® Exchange® Server 2003 configuration on somewhat legacy hardware with two examples of an Exchange 2010 configuration. The comparison reveals that you can gain significant efficiencies and cost savings by migrating to Exchange 2010 on new server and storage hardware from Dell.
New Exchange 2010 features that provide cost benefits in these configurations include:

• Mailbox resiliency via Database Availability Groups (DAGs)
• Personal archiving
• Reduced disk I/O
• Large mailbox support
• 64-bit architecture

In the Exchange 2003 configuration, two front-end servers provide Web and mobility access. There are six back-end servers — four active servers running mailboxes and mail processing and two standby servers that can take over in case of a server or application failure but are otherwise idle.

The first Exchange 2010 configuration is guided by the Agile Consolidated Model, which values consolidation and virtualization and takes advantage of the high compute density offered by blades. It uses the Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e blade chassis, two PowerEdge M710 full-height blades and two Dell EqualLogic™ PS6500 Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area networks (SANs). The second configuration — guided by the Simple Distributed Model, useful for customers planning to implement an infrastructure dedicated to Exchange alone — is built on six PowerEdge R510s.

Key advantages of the Exchange 2010 configurations:

• In terms of power and cooling, each 2010 configurations is just over 100 percent more efficient than the Exchange 2003 configuration
• In terms of dollars per actual mailbox GB, the 2010 configurations are 9 and 15 times less expensive, respectively