OCZ has published another whitepaper, written by Allon Cohen, PhD, regarding acceleration of the Microsoft (MS) Exchange Server and maximizing users in a virtualized environment with flash-powered consolidation.


Since Microsoft's Exchange Server is one of the most widely used e-mail server platforms in enterprise environments and uses client applications such as MS Outlook to connect a massive number of users to a central servers in order to enable e-mail communications as well as calendars, tasks, contacts, notes and much more, the whitepaper deals with maximizing the end user experience of MS Exchange server, by decreasing storage latency and increasing transactional IOPS as well as improving user experience and reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with a simple solution which includes PCI-Express based SSD such as OCZ's Z-Drive R4 and OCZ's VXL Software Solution.

While HDDs are still considered as a standard for virtualized environments and external storage arrays, the high TCO as well as low performance and high latency are big problems which can be solved with flash caching of most frequently used data on flash memory that resides within the virtualization host server and also enabling flash cache to scale with the size of the cluster or total capacity of the external storage area network (SAN).

In order to achieve highest possible IOPS and lowered storage latency in virtualized MS Exchange Server environments, OCZ VXL Software offers an optimized solution which brings a rich feature set for heightened data acceleration and high availability (HA), and is deployed as a virtual appliance on the virtualization host server, distributing flash resources on demand across VM applications to maximize performance. It uses VXL SAN-less Data Center mode which enables flash to be exposed to any VM in an virtualized cluster, thus delivering high availability and mirroring without the need of external SANs.

The white paper shows performance results of the VM without acceleration, with VXL and with VXL with in SAN-less Datacenter mode, showing a rise of performance of six times up to eighteen times, with much higher transactional IOPS and more importantly, much lower latency.

The OCZ VXL software, combined with an OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD certainly provides much better performance but also lowers general TCO and allows the same virtual infrastructure to support a much larger number of users due to higher performance as well as allow Enterprise IT departments and cloud providers to enable virtualization for heavy application loads such as MS Exchange Server.

You can download the full whitepaper via link below.







Source: OCZ.com.