DSL EXTREME
ALACRITECH CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

National ISP Implements Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators to Address Storage Expansion Needs in Microsoft Exchange Environment; Cost-effective Solution Ensures Scalability and Resiliency While Maintaining Maximum System Performance

• Industry/Market:
  » Internet/Technology
  
• Challenge:
  » Find a flexible and economical storage replacement for aging Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) infrastructure
  » Ensure scalability and reliability for mission-critical applications
  » Improve server efficiency, ensuring servers can move large amounts of customer e-mail without slow down on customer side
  » Enable rapid backups without interruptions
  
• iSCSI Solution:
  » Alacritech® SES1001T iSCSI Accelerators and Network Appliance™ FAS270
  
• Benefits:
  » Cost-effective and easy-to-manage iSCSI Storage-Attached Network (SAN) implemented to replace aging DAS
  » Centralized management, scalability and redundancy assured; storage expansion challenges solved
  » TCP/IP processing effectively offloaded from CPUs, server bottlenecks eliminated
  » Network latency significantly reduced, large amounts of customer e-mail moves quickly and easily
  » Server and network performance significantly increased to accommodate large files
  » Rapid backups conducted without downtime
  

“DSL Extreme implemented an iSCSI SAN using the Alacritech SES1001 iSCSI Accelerators and Network Appliance FAS270. The NetApp filer coupled with Alacritech iSCSI cards on the server side have enabled our mail servers to move 2000 files per second or approximately 2.5 million customer e-mails a day with no delay on the customer side. This cost-effective iSCSI solution has enabled us to solve expansion challenges while guaranteeing global mail availability and fast response times to our users. We’re pleased to note we can fully snapshot Exchange backups without downtime while maintaining maximum system availability and performance.”
    Dean Russ, Director of Network Operations
    DSL Extreme

Business Overview:
DSL Extreme is one of the nation’s fastest growing ISPs offering high-speed and traditional Internet service and an array of online products including Web hosting and superior quality data circuits. DSL Extreme has headquarters in Los Angeles and supports tens of thousands of consumer and business customers in over twenty-one major metropolitan areas throughout the United States. The company has over 70 employees who are continuously developing new products and services and are known for providing exceptional customer service.

Business Challenge:
DSL Extreme’s data center houses a mix of over fifty Microsoft® Exchange and Linux servers that serve over 82,000 remote customers logging on for Internet and e-mail services. To support its rapidly growing customer base, continual data growth and new service offerings, DSL Extreme needed to transition from its DAS environment to networked storage. Dean Russ, DSL Extreme’s director of Network Operations wanted to implement a long-term solution that would ensure the company’s servers responsible for customer e-mail, its Web database and other applications could scale, provide rapid response times, and be quickly and efficiently backed up from a central location.

After investigating Fibre Channel solutions, Russ determined that due to the high cost and network integration requirements, a FC SAN was not a viable option. Jack McKeon, a Network Appliance account manager and Larry McCreanor of Insight Integrated Systems, a leading national systems integrator, recommended an iSCSI SAN solution utilizing the Network Appliance FAS270 for the easy, centralized storage management DSL Extreme required. Russ was familiar with running iSCSI over standard Network Interface Cards (NICs). However, knowing that the key to a high performance iSCSI configuration in an Exchange environment is ensuring the servers using iSCSI and the iSCSI storage run at the speeds required to enable fast access to Exchange mailbox stores, McCreanor suggested the new Alacritech SES1001 iSCSI Accelerators as opposed to standard NICs. The Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators efficiently offload storage I/O processing, help speed iSCSI data to and from the iSCSI storage, and are the only cards with failover capabilities.

After attending an industry event where the Alacritech cards were noted as offering seamless hardware acceleration for the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator in addition to the critical resiliency and systems management functionality DSL Extreme required, Russ opted to implement the NetApp® system and use Alacritech Accelerators on the server side.

Alacritech Solution and Benefits:
The award-winning Alacritech SES1001 iSCSI Accelerator is the industry’s top performing iSCSI controller and is the only card to accelerate the full Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator. Based on Alacritech’s patented SLIC Technology® Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture, the SES1001 enables wire-speed performance and a significantly higher transaction rate over all ASIC-based iSCSI HBAs. Alacritech Accelerators work to offload TCP/IP network protocol processing from the host CPU using a custom ASIC for protocol processing which significantly improves host processor efficiency, increases data throughput and reduces network latency.

“The Alacritech SES1001 Accelerator installed quickly like a network card with all the Microsoft drivers,” said Russ. “We simply had to configure the LUN and then instantly had a hard drive. The combined NetApp and Alacritech iSCSI solution has enabled our mail servers to move 2000 files per second, or approximately 2.5 million customer e-mails a day, with no delay on the customer side. By utilizing an IP storage solution for our Exchange application we’ve been able to cost-effectively solve our expansion challenges, guarantee global mail availability and fast response times to our customers, and fully snapshot Exchange back ups without downtime—all while maintaining maximum system availability and performance,” added Russ.

This iSCSI storage solution also enables rapid backups without any interruption of mail service. NetApp’s SnapManager® for Exchange uses the local Exchange server to send data to and from the iSCSI storage and allows Exchange to run while the snapshot takes place. Alacritech’s iSCSI Accelerator enables maximum performance of the snapshot process by providing CPU cycles to the Exchange server as well as the fastest I/O performance for the SnapManager for Exchange software which results in reduced overall time and system resource use during each snapshot.

“We’ve had great success with both NetApp’s and Alacritech’s leading iSCSI technology in data-intensive IP SAN environments,” said McCreanor. “Our NetApp customers are assured of seamless interoperability through Alacritech’s ‘NetApp-supported’ qualification and further benefit from Alacritech’s native acceleration of the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. The combined solution has proven to be ideal for IT managers looking for a cost-effective way to consolidate and centralize storage management while maintaining maximum functionality including failover in their IP SANs,” he added.

System Configuration: