Your Microsoft Exchange Server is down. What's your plan?

How important is e-mail to your business? Suppose that the CEO of your company is ready to address the board of directors and is waiting for an e-mail with final information pertaining to a merger. If Exchange is down and the CEO cannot receive this critical information, it can be disastrous.

To further illustrate the importance of e-mail, let's say that a fire breaks out in your company's main building, making the data center inaccessible. If all of your messaging servers are located within that building, then the primary mode of communication will be inaccessible at the time of a disaster. It's clear that messaging systems are critical, and that disaster recovery (DR) planning for e-mail is imperative in order to ensure that your business can continue to function even during a disaster.

Planning to Prevent Exchange Downtime
To achieve a sound DR plan, you start by creating a series of procedures you can follow to reliably and efficiently restore Exchange data and services in the event of a catastrophic failure. Depending on your needs, your DR procedure could be as simple as restoring from a tape backup. Or it could be a more robust solution with an arrangement of primary and secondary sites, with clusters for fail-over, and replication technology to ensure data consistency.

Large-scale adoption of e-mail by businesses continues to increase. According to Ferris Research, the number of corporate mailboxes worldwide is projected to grow from 131 million in 2001 to 225 million in 2005. And the size of each individual mailbox is also growing: According to Ferris, the average size of Exchange mailboxes grew 48% in 2002.

How important is e-mail to your business? Suppose that the CEO of your company is ready to address the board of directors and is waiting for an e-mail with final information pertaining to a merger. If Exchange is down and the CEO cannot receive this critical information, it can be disastrous.

To further illustrate the importance of e-mail, let's say that a fire breaks out in your company's main building, making the data center inaccessible. If all of your messaging servers are located within that building, then the primary mode of communication will be inaccessible at the time of a disaster. It's clear that messaging systems are critical, and that disaster recovery (DR) planning for e-mail is imperative in order to ensure that your business can continue to function even during a disaster.

Planning to Prevent Exchange Downtime
To achieve a sound DR plan, you start by creating a series of procedures you can follow to reliably and efficiently restore Exchange data and services in the event of a catastrophic failure. Depending on your needs, your DR procedure could be as simple as restoring from a tape backup. Or it could be a more robust solution with an arrangement of primary and secondary sites, with clusters for fail-over, and replication technology to ensure data consistency.

Depending on the requirements of your organization, VERITAS can provide the appropriate technology to help prevent Exchange downtime. For example, if you can afford a day or more of data loss and downtime, then a tape backup and restore procedure while vaulting the tapes offsite may be sufficient. But most organizations cannot afford to have their Exchange servers down for more then a day, and so will need to implement replication and clustering technologies to reduce the downtime associated with a disaster. VERITAS can provide the technology to fit the full range of disaster recovery requirements.

Backups and Bare Metal Restore
Disaster recovery begins with protecting your enterprise data with nightly backups. These nightly backups are the foundation to any data protection, high availability, or disaster recovery plan. With tape backups, data can be preserved in case of equipment failure, viruses, or other disasters. Tape backups should be considered the safety net to any data recovery plan.

Once data is stored on tape, the tapes must be sent offsite in order to protect against a complete site outage - a process known as tape vaulting. Should a complete site be shut down due to a disaster, backup tapes located offsite can be recovered and data can be restored.

Data, however, cannot be restored from a backup tape until there is something to restore to. Implementing VERITAS Bare Metal Restore simplifies and streamlines the server recovery process for VERITAS NetBackup, making it unnecessary to manually reinstall operating systems or configure hardware. With this technology, the amount of time to restore servers at the recovery location can be reduced from days to hours by eliminating the need for customized restore procedures on each platform. Effective backups enable Exchange services, whether a single mailbox or an entire system, to resume after a failure or disaster.

Replicating Data to Another Location
For applications that cannot afford to lose a day's worth of data under any circumstances, offsite tape backups alone are not sufficient and should be augmented with data replication. Data replication technology transfers the data to an alternate location in real-time, which can dramatically reduce potential data loss and speed recovery time by making current data available instantaneously at an alternate location.

The two modes of replication are synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous replication ensures an exact copy of the data to be at both the primary and secondary site at any given time. Although this mode of replication may seem to be the best solution, it can cause high network traffic and may create slow application response time. Asynchronous replication removes the network latency that may be caused by synchronous replication, but may leave the secondary site a few data transactions behind the primary site.

Regardless of the type of replication mode you select, it is imperative to adopt a technology that will not have technological deficiencies that can corrupt your data or lock you into a specific hardware vendor.

Clustering
Once organizations ensure that their data is protected, they need to be able to quickly bring the Exchange application online. Without Exchange availability, data availability is of no use.

Clustering technology protects your applications both at the primary site and multiple, wide-area sites. Clustering for disaster recovery can be used within a metropolitan area network (MAN) as well as a wide-area network (WAN). In either case, clustering requires geographically mirrored or replicated data, so current data is in place at the recovery site. In the event of a disaster, rather than having to manually bring up Exchange to the secondary site, clustering software can provide automation. Exchange can be back up within minutes, rather than hours.

A Good Night's Sleep
'Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, where have I gone wrong? Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'' - Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)

To rest assured that you're ready to recover from disaster, at minimum you need to:


• Devise a solid backup and recovery plan and perform periodic 'fire drills' to ensure the integrity of your plan.


• Examine the Windows 2000 Event Viewer logs to proactively look for problems that could be developing.


• Keep good records of changes (hardware or software) made to production systems. If changes have been made to your systems, the method of restoration may be determined by information contained in your change log.


• Examine clustering and replication technologies for high availability and disaster recovery.

With effective disaster recovery planning and support from VERITAS, you'll be able to sleep well knowing you are able to avoid preventable downtime for your Exchange server and that, should a disaster occur, your Exchange environment will be protected.