Marlboro, Mass.—February 21, 2006—Egenera Inc., a global leader in utility computing, today announced that Avanade Inc. has issued a white paper, "Egenera® BladeFrame® Exchange 2003 Performance Load Test," which confirms that the Egenera BladeFrame system can be deployed in a high availability/high-volume Microsoft® Exchange 2003 environment. Avanade performed the testing in response to the requirements of a large customer. The white paper can be downloaded at www.egenera.com.
"As email and messaging have become increasingly mission-critical applications, large enterprises and government agencies require a computing platform that ensures high availability and rapid scalability. The testing confirms that the Egenera BladeFrame system is such a platform," said Brad Kern, managing director of global alliances, Egenera. "Compared with traditional servers, the BladeFrame's unique virtualized architecture requires fewer systems for large-scale Exchange deployments, simplifies disaster recovery and dramatically lowers costs."
"Our results show that the Egenera BladeFrame system can be configured to attain the required throughput expected with a 'Heavy Knowledge Worker' population as defined by Microsoft. Equally important, the BladeFrame can sustain this load over an extended period of time with no apparent degradation or instability," said Larry LeSueur, VP Infrastructure & Security, Avanade. "Coupling Egenera technology with Avanade's proven methodology for Microsoft Exchange implementation offers clients an enterprise-class messaging system while mitigating deployment risk."
The test environment was sized to support:
- Between 12,000 and 16,000 users as modeled by Microsoft's LoadSim 2003 using the Exchange MAPI
- Messaging Benchmark 3 (MMB3) user type
- A minimum of 12,000 IOPS (disk I/Os per second) using Microsoft's JetStress 2003 tool
Through testing, the Egenera BladeFrame servers were deemed capable of successfully supporting the targeted operational load. Specific benefits include:
- Stability: The Egenera BladeFrame test environment demonstrated the ability to support 12,099 IOPS distributed across four mailbox servers.
- Scalability: The test environment demonstrated the ability to configure the Egenera BladeFrame to achieve throughput for 15,800 MMB3 users.
- High Availability: The test environment demonstrated the ability to provide high availability successfully through multiple failover iterations. In each case, clients were able to automatically re-connect to a virtual server upon failover completion.
- Backup and Restore: The test environment demonstrated the ability to perform backup and recovery operations within acceptable limits.
Testing also highlighted some unique features of the Egenera system that distinguish the BladeFrame from other products by:
- The speed in which it can be provisioned
- Its reduced datacenter footprint
- Its ability to reduce complexity (HBAs, NICs, cables, etc.) by abstracting the storage area network (SAN) and network components from individual servers
- Its tools to deploy, administer and operate systems remotely
Press Contacts
Nancy Keswani
Egenera, Inc.
508-858-2605
nkeswani@egenera.com
Wayne St. Amand
Greenough Communications
617-275-6519
wstamand@greenoughcom.com
Avanade is the leading technology integrator specializing in the Microsoft enterprise platform. Our people help customers around the world maximize their IT investment and create comprehensive solutions that drive business results. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com.
Egenera is a global leader in delivering computing solutions that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera BladeFrame product family simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business applications and achieve higher resource utilization, faster application time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide. For more information visit www.egenera.com, call 508-858-2600 or send email to info@egenera.com.
Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and BladeFrame are registered trademarks of Egenera Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
