State of Delaware: Taming the email beast with blades

The second-smallest U.S. state after Rhode Island, Delaware is a 30-by-96-mile wedge of land on the Delmarva Peninsula. The state government maintains a central data center in the capital of Dover and a disaster recovery facility in New Castle, and its email system processes more than a million messages a day.

A decade ago, the state began consolidating its systems as part of a move to the Microsoft® Exchange and Active Directory® platforms. The government initially chose HP blade servers, but recently switched to Dell™ PowerEdge™ M-Series blade servers with Intel® Xeon® processors.

This case study describes the variety of benefits the Dell blades have brought, including:

• Reducing downtime each year from days to minutes
• Reducing rack space requirements by 66 percent
• Simplifying remote deployment and management
• Lowering energy costs
• Increasing capacity significantly

The state also estimates that matching the current capacity on the previous systems would raise total cost of ownership by about 20 percent. Dell EqualLogic™ PS5000E storage arrays, meanwhile, are helping meet the state’s large email volume and retention requirements while reducing the time to administer logical units (LUNs) by 50 percent and helping save $1,000 per server port through simplified connectivity.