Ryan Pratt has written two Big Admin papers on the development of a Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance Storage Solution. One is for 1200 Exchange 2007 mailboxes and the other for 3000 Exchange 2007 mailboxes. Of both Ryan writes, "Not only does the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance provide a great performance/price ratio in a Microsoft Exchange environment, it can also serve the needs of any NFS, CIFS, file, print, or iSCSI attached application."

Pratt describes his PDFs as providing information on Sun Microsystems' storage solution for Microsoft Exchange Server, based on the Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) – Storage program. The ESRP – Storage program was developed by Microsoft Corporation as a common storage testing framework for vendors to provide information on the vendor's storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server software. He also refers readers to Microsoft for further details on the Microsoft ESRP – Storage program.

Pratt makes clear that both documents were developed by storage solution providers and reviewed by the Microsoft Exchange Product team and that the test results and data are based on the tests in the ESRP framework. He also adds the cautionary note that, "The customer should not quote the data for his/her pre-deployment verification. It is still necessary to validate the storage design for a specific customer environment. The data presented... should not be used for direct comparisons among the solutions."

Further, he shares the information that the ESRP program is not designed to be a benchmarking program; tests are not designed to get the maximum throughput for a given solution but, instead, to focus on producing recommendations from vendors for Exchange applications.

The best practices derived from both of these documents include the following:

• Use the Microsoft Diskpart utility to align the sectors of all Exchange 2007 storage volumes before formatting and set the Diskpart value to 64.
• Do not share Exchange 2007 disks with any other applications that are I/O intensive in order to avoid a negative effect on the disk subsystem's performance.
• When possible, separate the sequential write operations of logs from the random access of database volumes. Pratt reports creating the log volume and primary segment of the database volume on one volume and the additional segments on a second, different volume

The Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance is listed on the Windows Server Catalog of Tested Products site. [...read more...]

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