Hi Skip,

We use for our SQL-servers and Exchange servers indeed a private connection between de servers and the filers. This give a really better response time, because there is no competition between disk IO (to the logs and DB) and the client access. So yes, do it.

It was not clear for me, what protocol you use between the filer and your exchange server. When this is CIFS, than you can improve the performance an stability by using ISCSI. We use ISCSI for these applications, and that works great.

Best Regards,

Reinoud Reynders

University Hospital Leuven

Belgium

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Van: SKIP HOFMANN [mailto:SKIP.HOFMANN@ttisg.com] Verzonden: donderdag 5 augustus 2004 18:58 Aan: 'Bryant, Charlie' CC: ''toasters@mathworks.com' '; RAYMUND SANTOS Onderwerp: Exchange question

Hi Charlie

Thanks again for coming in yesterday and helping us out we really appreciated it. As explained yesterday I'm going to email you my questions/concerns about the exchange questions I had.

Currently we have are exchange 5.5 DB and logs on our FAS250, the logs and DB are on separate Vol. When we did a performance test yesterday on the FAS250 it did not appear to be working hard, at times we did see a spike, but for the most part the system was running below a high stress margin. The exchange DB is on the same Vol that houses a CIFS share and this share is the Home directory for a lot of users. We are planning on moving this data to a separate Vol so that our exchange DB doesn't have to compete for access time and possibly get bogged down by this CIFS share. The size of this CIFS share is 37 gigs. The exchange server and the FAS 250 are running at GIG E. What I was thinking of doing to speed access time from exchange to the FAS250 and hopefully from doing this our outlook clients will stop getting pop ups requesting data is this.

Connect the 2nd nic on the FAS with a cross over cable to the 2nd gigE card on our exchange server. Currently our servers are on a 10.20.x.x segment so the 1st nic on the FAS and the 1st nic on exchange are configured with this ip scheme. I'm going to configure nic 2 on the filer and nic 2 on exchange with a 192.168.x.x I'm doing this to try and force when the two servers need to talk to each other they do it over the nic 2. The only reason the FAS needs to talk to exchange and vice versa is because we have the DB and the logs on the FAS250. If I can have a separate connection for this communication instead of the communication having to go over the same nic card (nic1) then I'm thinking that this should speed up access time, and Outlook clients should notice faster speeds.

Please let me know what you think, and thanks again

Skip