Your Microsoft Exchange Server is down. What's your plan? (page 1 of 2)

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.