EMC CLARiiON And Efficient Infrastructure

PostPath has worked in conjunction with EMC to enable customers to:

Take advantage of low-cost disk drives
Deliver large or even bottomless mailboxes
Use built-in snapshots as a backup mechanism, with direct, live restore available for a whole server, for one user, for one folder or even for a single message
Use built-in replication technology to deliver effective low-cost high availability

In short, the work enables customers to enhance the service they provide to users, maximize uptime, make substantial savings in their storage costs, and slash data-management expenses.

The Benefits of High Performance

The PostPath Server offers excellent storage-subsystem load characteristics, so that:

Storage racks can be fully populated without overburdening IO channels
Low-cost S-ATA drives can be used in place of more expensive Fibre Channel (typically S-ATA is approx. 25% the price per GB of Fibre Channel)
Server density can be improved, reducing TCO
Increased mailbox size - or bottomless mailboxes - enabled at low cost
Users' wait times (latency) and synchronization delays reduced dramatically
Broad deployment of more demanding applications such as mobile handset support enabled

Performance Example

Cost effective mass-storage S-ATA drives are generally not recommended for mid-sized or larger deployments, given the high IO load email servers can generate. In comparison PostPath delivers a step change improvement in IO characteristics, scalability, and cost effectiveness.

In the following example, a Dell-2950, quad core Xeon E53202X4MB Cache, 1.86GHz, 8GB 667 MHz memory server was used. The disk array was setup as an 8-spindle RAID-10 S-ATA configuration. An 8-hour LoadSIM soak test was conducted with the following results:

S-ATA (low-cost mass storage) load test

	50th Percentile Latency	95th Percentile Latency
PostPath	0.10s	0.21s
Exchange 2007	0.25s	4.56s

LoadSIM is a Microsoft load testing tool. Typically, it is recommended that latency is kept below one second for the 95th percentile. With the cost effective disk subsystem, based on SATA, PostPath Server latency is less that a quarter of a second - well below the one second limit.

What this means for a customer is that they can now scale their email storage, and email servers, more cost-effectively.

The Benefits of File-based Data Management

Many email servers use proprietary databases to store their email data. However, modern system architectures provide an alternative to the closed database model, and the simplest way of making data accessible is simply to store it as a collection of files - which is exactly what the PostPath Server does.

Using files to represent emails and appointments allows sophisticated commercial storage systems, such as EMC® CLARiiON® CX3 UltraScale™ range, to manage huge numbers of objects efficiently. Thanks to the "always consistent" state of PostPath's file-based store, I.T. can leverage EMC's native file-management tools, such as the Navisphere® management suite, for backup/restore, snapshotting, replication, search, and so on, directly, without the need for expensive proprietary or custom integration.

The file-based nature of the PostPath's Server back-end changes email data management from the daunting task of admninistering a proprietary database into the straightforward one of managing files.