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The 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter of Choice
in Microsoft Exchange Environments
QLogic Offers Best Performance and Scalability for Microsoft
Exchange Workloads
Key Findings
The QLogic® FabricCache™ 10000 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter enhances transaction and latency performance for
Microsoft Exchange Servers® by optimizing random read-intensive workloads that are inherent in Exchange and e-mail applications.
The QLogic 10000 Series FabricCache technology is implemented as a PCIe®-based intelligent I/O device that provides integrated Fibre
Channel storage network connectivity, flash memory caching, and embedded processing. The 10000 Series technology makes caching
I/O data from Exchange transparent to the host.
QLogic’s caching technology* in the QLogic 10000 Series Fibre Channel Adapter enhances Microsoft Exchange with the following:
• Increased transactional IOPS by up to 400 percent
• Decreased Exchange I/O read latency by up to 80 percent
• Overall improved performance in the Exchange environment
The QLogic 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter offers better throughput and IOPS compared to the Emulex® 8Gb
LightPulse™ Adapter, and in turn supports the additional demand of Microsoft Exchange e-mail volume and increasing workloads.
• Driving Microsoft Exchange-like I/O loads in an attempt to saturate the adapters showed 133 percent better IOPS while pushing
more than 279 MBps throughput for the QLogic 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapters versus the Emulex 8Gb LightPulse Adapter.
• The Emulex LPe12000 fails to keep up with increasing Exchange workloads as workloads increased past 16 outstanding
I/Os. In addition, the QLogic adapter continued to scale, achieving more than 35 percent better MBps than Emulex with
64 outstanding I/Os.
*QLogic patent pending, caching technology.
Executive Summary
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E-mail has grown to be one of the most important communication
and collaboration applications for worldwide businesses. According
to a report from The Radicati Group1, Microsoft Exchange Server
will have a total installed base that is expected to reach 470 million
by 2014, with an average annual growth rate of 12 percent. With
this expanding penetration of Exchange, it is imperative that the
user experience remains unaffected by increasing Exchange server
workloads. Exchange IOPS and latency relate directly to the usability
of Exchange and its associated end-user e-mail systems, as well
as the number of mailboxes that can be effectively supported on a
server. Today, Exchange is mission critical, demanding the highest
levels of performance from servers and their associated SAN storage
infrastructure. The introduction of multiprocessor CPUs coupled
with virtualization technologies provide the resources to meet these
demanding requirements for Exchange servers, but compound the
demand for high-performance, low-latency, scalable I/O connectivity
between servers and SAN storage.
It is imperative to deploy a high-performance, scalable server
adapter technology to meet this ever-growing requirement for I/O.
1 The Radicati Group, Inc.’s latest study, Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook Analysis 2010 – 2014
The QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter,
featuring server-based caching operation, and the QLogic 2500 Series
8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter, featuring standard Host Bus Adapter
operation, provide high-performance, scalable solutions for Exchange
server environments.
To help IT decision makers determine the best, most informed adapter
choice, QLogic has developed a series of benchmarks showing the
performance and scalability of QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series 8Gb
Fibre Channel Adapters. Benchmarks also show the performance and
scalability advantages of the QLogic 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel
Adapter over the Emulex 8Gb LightPulse Adapter in a variety of realworld scenarios using SAN-attached Exchange environments.
QLogic compared the overall performance of the 8Gb adapters when
configured to emulate a real-world SAN with maximum throughput
workloads. These tests highlight the advantage delivered by the
QLogic 10000 Series Adapters and QLogic 2500 Series Adapters in
Exchange environments.
Introduction
This paper provides performance testing information for two specific
QLogic solutions for Exchange environments:
• FabricCache Fibre Channel Adapters featuring integrated, flash-based
caching for application performance acceleration
• Standard Fibre Channel Adapters featuring high-performance and low-
power requirements for SAN attachment
For FabricCache Adapters, QLogic used Microsoft’s Jetstress workload tool
to test end-to-end server, network, and storage performance operating in
an infrastructure that includes a Fibre Channel attached storage array with
standard hard disk drives as the target, and the QLogic FabricCache 10000
Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter as the device under test (DUT). QLogic
chose this configuration to characterize the operational performance of the
FabricCache Adapter in a real-world environment, where an existing legacy
SAN would typically be present. The results provide baseline performance
data for the configured environment without caching enabled, and with
various levels of caching enabled to provide a performance comparison.
Microsoft provides the Jetstress 2010 tool for simulating Microsoft
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Exchange Server 2010 database I/O load and for validating hardware
deployments against design targets.
The test’s objectives are selected to enable the best understanding of
application performance and environmental usage under various user
loads with key indicators such as transaction latency and IOPS.
For the testing performed on the standard Fibre Channel Adapters, QLogic
used the industry-standard IOmeter workload tool and a solid-state storage
system as the target to facilitate a maximum performance environment for
the QLogic and Emulex Fibre Channel Adapters as the DUT.
Server-Side Storage Acceleration
Storage I/O is the primary performance bottleneck for data-intensive
applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server. Processor and memory
performance have grown in-step with Moore’s Law—that is, getting faster
and smaller—while storage performance has lagged far behind. Over the
past two decades, delivering performance from data storage has become
the bane of application administrators, and recent challenges are poised
to severely constrain the capabilities of the infrastructure in the face of
increasing virtualization, consolidation, and user loads.
A new class of server-side storage acceleration is the latest innovation in
the market addressing this performance disparity. The idea is simple: fast,
reliable, solid-state flash memory connected to the server brings faster
data access to the Exchange server’s CPU. Flash memory is highly available
in the market and promises to perform much faster than any rotational disk
under typical, small, highly random, enterprise I/O workloads.
The 10000 Series Adapter from QLogic provides I/O acceleration to
storage traffic for Exchange servers. The 10000 Series Adapter is a PCIebased I/O device that provides the integrated storage network (Fibre
Channel) connectivity, I/O caching technology, integrated flash memory,
and embedded processing that are required to make management and
caching tasks transparent to the host server. The QLogic solution delivers
the application performance acceleration benefits of transparent, serverbased cache without the limitations of solutions that require separate,
server-based storage management software and operating system (OS)
filter drivers. As a shared caching resource, QLogic 10000 Series Adapters
extend server-based caching to virtualized and clustered environments,
which up to now have been precluded by the single server “captive” nature
of existing server-based caching solutions.
For optimal Microsoft Exchange performance, maximized transactional
I/O rate and minimized I/O latency indicate a peak-performing Exchange
system. By optimizing these performance values, the platform can
absorb additional users, thereby reducing server, management, and
overall infrastructure costs. The key benefits of the QLogic 10000 Series
Adapter identified in this paper are improved performance and reduced
overall costs.
Test Setup
The test setup was configured with an Intel® Xeon® server connected
to HP® Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) storage through the QLogic 10000
Series Adapter and the QLogic 5800V/5802V Fibre Channel Switch.
Jetstress runs were executed with cache levels varying in size from zero to
100 percent of the actual Exchange database size. See Appendix B for actual
configuration information.
Figure 1 shows the basic setup for the Exchange test.
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Figure 1. Exchange Test Setup
Exchange Performance Results Using Jetstress
The tests demonstrate that, at various levels of LUN caching in the 10000
Series Adapter, caching delivers as much as a 400 percent increase in
the quantity of IOPS and an 80 percent reduction in I/O latency. These
performance improvements are directly related to caching data closer to
the Exchange server processor, which eliminates Fibre Channel transit time
over the SAN. Table 1 shows these results.
Table 1. Exchange Performance Test Results
Criteria
Exchange
I/O Read
Latency (ms)
Exchange
Transactions
(IOPS)
Latency
Reduction
IOPS
Increase
Figure 2 shows the total Exchange transactional IOPS as measured by the
Jetstress test. With no cache enabled in the 10000 Series Adapter, Jetstress
measured 1,056 transactional IOPS. In this case, all I/O traffic makes the
round trip from the server to the SAN storage array. At 100 percent cache,
the cache size is equal to the database size in this test. The measured IOPS
of 5,270 has increased by nearly 400 percent.
No
Cache
4.724 2.648 2.484 2.021 1.558 0.922
1056 1819 2017 2277 3154 5270
0% (44%) (47%) (57%) (67%) (80%)
0% 72% 91% 116% 199% 399%
25% 30% 50% 75% 100%
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