Azaleos: News coverage of Azaleos Solutions, Exchange 2007 Migration and Highly Available e-mail

“With Microsoft iSCSI boot capabilities and managed solutions such as the Azaleos OneServer, we can leverage our existing infrastructure to keep our system management overhead to a minimum. Fully utilizing the storage virtualization capabilities of our SAN combined with a blade-centric approach will help us to simplify our server environment and enhance our disaster recovery strategy.”
- Lee Hudson, IT Director, Zumiez
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Exchange 2007 storage enhancements: Cure-all or Band-Aid? SearchStorage.com
July 7, 2006

Peddling his newest wares — a product called BladeMail, which hosts Exchange on diskless blades by IBM packaged with Exchange store on IBM-rebranded NetApp SAN storage — at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Boston this year, Keith McCall, CEO of Azaleos, said that the chief problem with Exchange is that it is still based on the decade-old JET database, which does sequential reads and random writes. Because a search query has to read through data in sequential order, but the data it's looking for has been written in multiple places on a disk at random, searches for information within Exchange can be costly in system resources and time-consuming.

Microsoft already claims that Exchange 2007 will address some of the common storage, replication and backup headaches without a change in database. On the BladeMail product, which Microsoft has officially endorsed, the company expects to be able to support up to 17,500 Exchange 2003 email users on a single BladeCenter chassis, and up to 70,000 Exchange 2007 email users per BladeCenter when Exchange 2007 becomes available. (A regular version of Exchange 2007 will jump up to 2000 to 5000 users per server, rather than the 2003 limit of 200.) The company also plans to move to a 64-bit operating system on Exchange servers, increasing the memory from 4 gigabytes (GB) to 8 GB.