Microsoft Exchange Storage

As the world’s most popular messaging platform, Microsoft Exchange holds a dominant market position and an undeniable role as a business-critical application. While maintaining continuous access to Microsoft Exchange is critical for business productivity, even minor performance issues can have significant consequences for businesses — especially those with huge volumes of data across hundreds or even thousands of mailboxes.

The always-acute demand for email access within the enterprise is exacerbated by a demanding workload of thousands of random, small-block-size requests that many storage subsystems have difficulty handling, resulting in performance bottlenecks. Despite the advances made in IO handling by the successive versions of Microsoft Exchange, the configuration of optimal IO infrastructure is buried in arcane details and complex best-practices guides. As enterprises increasingly rely on always-available email access, data protection of this infrastructure with rapid recovery capability is paramount. While some emails archived for compliance reasons can be stored on slower media, production data is needed immediately with users requiring a higher Quality of Service (QoS). Based on these application characteristics, the underlying storage systems should be able to utilize the appropriate media type (SATA, Fibre Channel, or SSD) to gain the most performance benefits at the least cost.

The Pillar Axiom® Application-Aware™ solutions provide application profiles tuned for Microsoft Exchange deployments that eliminate the need for complex configuration details. Pillar’s Microsoft Exchange application profiles are designed to deliver high utilization rates and robust performance, while providing guaranteed service levels based on data priority. By deploying the Pillar Axiom system to power your Microsoft Exchange environment, you can expect:

• Seamless system resource allocation to handle each data request based on established business priority.
• Unmatched performance based on the Pillar Axiom system’s combination of large cache, distributed RAID and QoS
• Unified storage pool in the Pillar Axiom system means easier management for data assigned to varying QoS levels, as well as local data protection.
• Massive scalability to address your ever-growing Microsoft Exchange environment.
• Lower costs realized from Pillar’s unique architecture that allows for less expensive SATA drives to be utilized instead of a more expensive all-Fibre Channel configuration.
• Provide low latency configurations with SSD Bricks for the most critical user groups

Business productivity can be greatly and adversely affected by poor Microsoft Exchange performance. Application-Aware Pillar Axiom solutions enable your business to realize a high QoS by allocating storage resources based on business priorities. Click here to learn more about Microsoft Exchange solutions from Pillar Data Systems.