Dell First with Benchmark of Clustered Exchange Server System

by Alex Woodie

Dell this week announced it has recorded the industry's first benchmark of a clustered Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 system. The four-node cluster of two-way Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers was run against Microsoft's MAPI Messaging Benchmark 3 (MMB3) benchmark, which attempts to simulate the workloads that an e-mail and collaboration server running Exchange Server 2003 can expect to find in the real world.

The Dell PowerEdge 1750 system that was benchmarked was a two-way 1750 server equipped with 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon processors with hyper-threading. The servers were connected in a cluster configuration and backed by an EMC CX600 storage area network. Dell said that this setup costs $7,800 per processor, which brings the total cost to just over $62,000.

Dell's cluster scored a 15,000 on the MMB3 benchmark. Since no other vendors have yet recorded MMB3 benchmarks for their clustered systems, it is difficult to do comparisons, which is the whole point of benchmarks. At this point, Dell can claim to be the leader in deploying Exchange Server 2003 for high availability environments. At the very least, it showed the greatest initiative to benchmark clustered systems, which says something.

Kim Akers, senior director of the Exchange Server group at Microsoft, hailed Dell's work on publishing the benchmark of a clustered system. "The first high-availability benchmark study of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 on Dell PowerEdge servers is a critical step toward reinforcing the value of the scalable enterprise," Akers said.

While there are no other vendors with benchmarks of their clustered servers running Exchange Server 2003, Dell also tested the same PowerEdge 1750 server with the same Xeon processors that was used in the cluster, in a single-server environment. This server scored a 5,900 on the MMB3 benchmark. On a per-processor basis, Dell's clustered system is doing about 38 percent less work than the single-server setup, which shows how much overhead clustering accounts for.

The MMB3 is an updated version of the old MMB2 benchmark, which Microsoft developed for testing Exchange 2000 Server. Both benchmarks were designed to simulate typical corporate e-mail use; the MMB3 number gives a rough estimate of the number of typical e-mail users the server can support. Microsoft made a few changes with MMB3, including the use of the Outlook 2003 client, the introduction of Smart Folders and server-side rules, and the introduction of bigger messages and bigger mailbox sizes. Microsoft has also turned off journaling from the new benchmark. (A complete description of the benchmark is available on Microsoft's Web site.)

Microsoft introduced the MMB3 benchmark last August, but most of the 16 servers that have been officially tested against the benchmark were entered this summer. The fastest two-way box on the MMB3 benchmark is a Fujitsu Siemens Primergy RX600 loaded with two Intel Xeon processors, running at 3.2 GHz, which scored 6,664 on the test. The fastest four-way box is a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL585 G2 equipped with four AMD Opteron processors, running at 2.4 GHz, which scored 9,000. HP also benchmarked this same four-way HP ProLiant DL585 G2 server but equipped with 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon processors, and it scored a 7,300. This is about 19 percent slower than what the Opteron-equipped DL585 G2 server scored, which AMD is making hay about.