Microsoft® Exchange
Email is one of the most critical applications in any company and as such can demand significant resources in terms of hardware costs, systems management, and of course the time and energy of the IT department.
Microsoft Exchange is a driving force in planning any network. As a critical application that requires significant resources in terms of network bandwidth, data storage, and processing power it is no surprise that IT professionals consider Exchange one of their primary concerns.
Network Factors
Exchange can place significant demand on server resources. As companies grow and add mailboxes to Exchange servers it is easy to overwhelm even the fastest server. And, the more clients on the network, the greater the impact on server performance.
The usual answer is to simply throw more servers at the problem. However this can actually cause more problems than it solves. Adding servers is an expensive solution. In addition to buying the new server, additional operating system, Exchange, and other application licenses must be purchased. Then there is the matter of storage for the server, installation of the server, the complexity of managing and backing up the server, and finally the continuous costs of power and cooling.
Alacritech® Scalable Network Accelerators™ provide the solution for a truly scalable network. By offloading the processing of the network protocols away from the server, the server has increased processor availability to support more clients than ever before. Simply put, Alacritech technology allows the system to serve the clients, not the network.
Storage Challenges
Microsoft Exchange requires a lot of storage. First, Microsoft recommends that the Exchange databases and transaction logs be kept on separate physical volumes. Factor in the number of users and the capacity of each database and it is easy to see how the storage requirements can skyrocket.
Whenever possible, companies have made the choice to move to networked storage. This is because network storage provides many benefits in terms of increased reliability, decreased management costs, and an overall reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Companies that choose an iSCSI solution for their storage network can realize all of the benefits of network storage at a fraction of the cost of Fibre Channel, while using standard Ethernet for reduced complexity.
Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators provide improved network performance and scalability to both the iSCSI storage on the back end, and the network on the front end. With networking processing removed, servers can maximize their processing power, to run longer, faster, and support more clients than ever before -- reducing or eliminating the need for companies to purchase additional servers.
Learn how Alacritech and Microsoft can improve your file server system performance.
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