When Microsoft set out to design its next generation Exchange platform, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 (Exchange 2007), one of the major objectives was to tame the I/O demands, which the previous versions placed on the disk storage subsystem. Since its introduction, Microsoft Exchange, by its nature, has been a very disk I/O intensive application. The demands placed on the storage subsystem required Exchange Server 2003 (Exchange 2003) customers to focus on storage performance and not just on disk capacity. If the storage solution was not capable of providing the disk I/O performance needed, the server would bottleneck, and response times would increase, resulting in unhappy end users. This was, unfortunately, a common support issue for Microsoft, and difficult to address from an application standpoint with the limited memory resources available in the x32 Windows operating system.

With Exchange 2007, Microsoft was able to move away from the limitations of a 32-bit operating system with the move to a 64-bit operating system using Windows Server 2003 x 64 platforms. This allowed for significant increases in available memory resources for the application, allowing memory to scale well beyond the 4GB available to Exchange 2003; designers could now cache greater portions of the Exchange database(s) in memory. By increasing database cache, larger portions of the user's mailbox can now be cached, reducing the I/O demands on disk.

This presentation will demonstrate the benefits of additional system memory in the ProLiant BladeSystem server along with providing details on other performance considerations when working larger memory configurations.