As described more fully in last months SCI’s newsletter, to the left is a chart depicting Exchange Solution Reporting Program (ESRP) results for up to 1000 mailboxes in the database read and write per second category. This top 10 chart is dominated by HP’s new MSA 2000fc G2 product.
Microsoft will tell you that ESRP is not to be used to compare one storage vendor against another but more as a proof of concept to show how some storage can support a given email workload. The nice thing about ESRP, from my perspective, is that it represents a realistic storage workload rather than the more synthetic workloads offered by the other benchmarks.
What does over 3000 Exchange database operations per second mean to the normal IT shop or email user. It should mean more emails per hour can be sent/received with less hardware. It should mean a higher capacity to service email clients. It should mean a happier IT staff.
But does it mean happier end-users?
I would show my other chart from this latest dispatch that has read latency on it but that would be two charts. Anyways, what the top 10 Read Latency chart would show is that EMC CLARiiON dominates with the overall lowest latency and has the top 9 positions with various versions of CLARiiON and replication alternatives being reported in ESRP results. The 9-CLARiiON subsystems had a latency at around 8-11 msecs. The one CLARiiON on the chart above (CX3-20, #7 in the top 10) had a read latency around 9 msec. and write latency at 5 msec. In contrast, the HP MSA had a read latency of 16 msecs with a write latency of 5 msec. – very interesting.
What this says is that database transfers per second are now more like throughput measures and even though a single database operation (latency) may be almost ~2X longer (9 vs. 16 msecs), it can still perform more database transfer operations per second due to concurrency. Almost makes sense.
Are vendors different?
This probably says something more about the focus of the two storage vendor engineering groups – EMC CLARiiON on getting data to you the fastest and HP MSA on getting the most data through the system. It might also speak to what the vendor’se ESRP teams were trying to show as well. In any case, EMC’s CLARiiON and HP’s MSA have very different performance profiles.
Which vendor’s storage product makes best sense for your Exchange servers – that’s a more significant question?
The full report will be up on my website later this week but if you want to get this information earlier and receive your own copy of our newsletter – just subscribe by emailing us.