Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ISCSI VS. FIBRE CHANNEL IN MS EXCHANGE ENVIRONMENTS

Today, IT managers experience shrinking backup windows, exponential data growth, and limited budgets for new hires and training. Recently, Spectra Logic conducted benchmark tests establishing that iSCSI backup performance is essentially equal to Fibre Channel for Microsoft Exchange database backups. These results validate expectations that iSCSI presents an important new opportunity for IT organizations to implement storage consolidation at a fraction of the cost of Fibre Channel.

Spectra Logic engineers simulated a realistic customer environment by performing a hot backup operation of a Microsoft Exchange 2000 database. The database was backed up first over a Gigabit Ethernet network using iSCSI and then repeated over a 1Gigabit Fibre Channel SAN. The results were surprising. At 33 MB/sec for iSCSI and only 35 MB/sec for Fibre Channel there was effectively no difference in performance. This data confirms that in a Microsoft Exchange environment it is the software and server hardware configuration that determines backup performance, not the storage network. Given equal performance, with an 88 percent cost advantage iSCSI should quickly become the backup consolidation network of choice for Microsoft Exchange environments.

"If the e-mail server cannot stream data fast enough to fill a Fibre Channel pipe, why pay for one?" said Sharon Isaacson, senior product manager, Spectra Logic. "With much lower acquisition and management costs, iSCSI-based storage networking performance is a much better match to the performance capabilities of the typical Exchange application environment."

Spectra Logic offers libraries with integrated support for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage networks. It has the only product line capable of supporting both protocols simultaneously and scaling them independently in the same library. Shipping its second generation of integrated Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel interface technologies, Spectra Logic's complete set of storage network interface options enable customers to more closely match their storage networking investment to their applications environment, thus maximizing backup consolidation ROI.

Details of the Microsoft Exchange database backup experiment are available at www.Spectralogic.com.