Basics of an efficient storage structure for Microsoft Exchange (page 1 of 3)

In a very short time, e-mail technology has become a communication backbone for most of today's companies. In many cases, end users will now notice an outage of the e-mail system much sooner than the failure of other business-critical applications. IT service departments in particular can attest to that.

Users tend to store a vast number of inbound and outbound electronic messages and their attachments forever, and this underlines the increasing use of e-mail systems as a pool of information that plays a vital role for businesses.

The information in this pool needs to be managed efficiently, protected, and recovered if errors occur or data is lost. At the same time, the solutions deployed must not be tied to specific storage hardware in any way. Instead, for reasons of cost, they have to give users the maximum amount of freedom to adjust to new storage and network environments.

The best-known and most widespread messaging system is probably Microsoft Exchange. Messages and attachments of public and private e-mail folders are stored in Exchange's own message databases. Transaction logs are also kept and managed, as is typical for databases. Because of the volume of data involved, Microsoft Exchange is a very storage-intensive application, and it stands and falls with the underlying storage infrastructure. An efficient storage infrastructure must meet three key requirements:

• Manageability
• Availability
• Recoverability

Manageability
Storage administrators need to keep a close eye on their Exchange infrastructure and be notified at an early stage of any changes in the growth pattern of database files and transaction logs. Intelligent trend analyses of past and present Exchange capacities point out deviations from previous growth patterns on the spot and enable storage administrators to respond proactively to such changes - either by migrating e-mail attachments via hierarchical storage management (HSM) interfaces or by increasing the storage capacity.

Of course, it must also be possible to configure additional storage units in online mode without impacting the running Microsoft Exchange environment. Automatic detection systems for Exchange resources tell administrators about available physical storage systems.

From these, administrators can then generate logical volumes, i.e. virtual disks, in keeping with their capacity, performance and resilience requirements. These logical volumes can even extend across the boundaries of heterogeneous storage systems to ensure that they are big, fast and resilient enough to back up the Exchange information.

A storage configuration wizard can handle many tasks automatically and rule out operating errors from the very start. Such wizards not only guide users through the configuration process but also suggest the optimal storage layout - for example the size or RAID level of Exchange volumes.

In large Exchange environments comprising several servers, storage administrators should no longer have to carry out these configuration steps for every single server. Once a configuration has been defined for one Exchange server, it can simply be replicated on all other servers in the infrastructure. This ensures that identical configurations are set up, and makes it easier to manage them.

A configuration wizard for Exchange is available to configure new storage systems and integrate them in the Exchange storage infrastructure. It suggests a storage layout for the Exchange volumes for the specific environment.

Availability
Optimum availability of the storage infrastructure is based, on the one hand, on advanced data protection technologies and, on the other hand, on organisational measures that ensure that Exchange operations are not impeded while necessary management work is in progress.

Data protection technologies
It is vital to minimise planned downtime and prevent unplanned downtime, so this aspect has to be taken into account early - when logical volumes are created for Exchange.