Microsoft extols the storage virtues of Exchange 2010

March 31, 2010 -- Microsoft is out to dispel some of the storage myths surrounding Exchange 2010 and promote the use of low-cost disks to reduce storage costs while actually improving the availability of Exchange.

According to a recent blog posted by Microsoft's Exchange guru, Astrid McClean, the software giant has been getting some interesting feedback regarding the storage capabilities – or lack thereof – of the company's the latest version of the company's Exchange e-mail application.

McClean maintains that not only does Exchange 2010 not require high performance storage, but also that IT admins can actually give users bigger mailboxes using low-cost storage systems.

Microsoft claims that built-in features including high availability and disaster recovery, storage system improvements, and self-healing from disk faults let customers use large, inexpensive disks in configurations that maximize data redundancy.

Some of the more interesting tidbits from Astrid's blog:

Exchange 2010 doesn't support NAS…but it does support a large range of storage options including SAN and DAS. Depending on your high availability model, storage can be configured using RAID or RAID-less (JBOD) storage. Different customers will require different solutions based on their requirements, but everyone has the ability to deploy large mailboxes at low cost.

Exchange 2010 supports up to 100,000 items per folder, up from 20,000 in Exchange 2007. In addition to this, Outlook 2007 SP1 Feb09 update, Outlook 2007 SP2 & Outlook 2010 provide good performance for Cached Exchange Mode for mailboxes up to 10 GB in size, and even larger (25GB) using faster disks like 7.2K drives or SSD.

McClean also says the Exchange 2010 store was improved to support very large mailboxes (100 GB+).

InfoStor conducted an interview with McClean prior to the launch of Exchange 2010 outlining some of the new storage features (see "Q&A: The storage implications of Exchange 2010").

In addition to McClean's blog, Microsoft has published a white paper outlining the storage features of Exchange 2010.

In related news, EMC recently became the first storage vendor to take advantage of an Exchange API that allows for integrated SAN-based replication with Exchange 2010 (see "EMC integrates replication tools with Exchange 2010").