Keeping Exchange up and running 24x7

Back then Email was used by academics and research personnel. As a way to share research and collaborate findings. However early research found that up wards of 70% of all email traffic in the late 1970s and early 1980s was for personal use.

If you had told organisations back then that this messaging system (email) would one day replace the telex machines and the fax machine most of them would have laughed at you. Heaven forbid mentioning that email would one day become a critical application for organisations in the 21 Century.

This is exactly what is happening; Email Applications, such as Microsoft Exchange offer organisations increased business benefits; like improved communication, increased productivity, shorter sales cycles, increased revenue and increased market share.

Microsoft Exchange is a great example of how an email application has become much more than just a messaging system. Today Exchange is being used by organisations for Business critical processes such as purchasing approval, sales quotes invoicing etc.

As the importance of Exchange grows and it begins to offer more businesses benefits, the availability of the Exchange Server starts to play a critical role in the organisation. The onus is placed onto the IT department to guarantee the availability of the Exchange Server(s).

Over and above this, Exchange has been utilised by individual users as an electronic filing cabinet - which in turn is creating huge storage management problems for Exchange and System Administrators, as users mail folders are increasing in size on a daily basis - this exponential growth needs to be managed.

Organisations normally perform Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to help then determine which level of availability best meets their short and long-term objectives for the different applications in their environment. It's fairly straightforward to do a BIA for a ERP system, an Order Entry system or an HR Database as each minute of downtime can be equated to a £# for the downtime.

The organisation can then determine what to spend on the technology solution that will meet the need of the business. Typically an ERP application is Mission Critical and requires the highest level of availability (99.999% uptime). The Order Entry System might be Business Critical and only require 99.99% uptime.

The HR Database will typically only be Task Critical and its level of availability will be far less, somewhere in the region of 98%. Doing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) on an Exchange 2000 Server to determine it's level of criticality is not so easy, as its difficult to place a £ number against the downtime associated with unavailability of Exchange.

Exchange could be seen as Career Critical - if it's down the CIO will be getting a call from the President and it won't be to ask the CIO to lunch! Email is a very interregnal part of today's organisations and as such it needs to be available 24x7 both for financial reasons and for the companies external image.

Business Critical availability of Exchange can be achieved using the VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000. Over and above the increased availability that is achieved by using VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 better levels of Storage Management and faster recovery can be attained for the Exchange Server.

The Edition is a tightly integrated suite of VERITAS industry-leading storage management technologies (VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS FlashSnap) engineered specifically for Exchange 2000. Configuring and managing Exchange servers requires not only a good knowledge of Microsoft Exchange, but also the ability to manage the underlying storage to prevent outages.

Frequently, these are two different skill sets, requiring Exchange administrators and System administrators to work together to keep systems running at optimal capacity and performance. VERITAS Edition helps the Exchange administrator manage the Exchange environment and its underlying storage from a single interface, using Exchange-based terminology that resonates with the administrator.

This centralised, management enables Exchange administrators to work efficiently, reduces training costs and simplifies the management of multiple servers.

One of the most important tasks of the Exchange administrator is ensuring a rapid recovery if and when failures occur. VERITAS Edition for Exchange reduces the incidences of failure caused by out-of-space errors or storage failure, but logical errors such as data corruption and user error can still occur.

Frequent and comprehensive backups are necessary. For many Exchange servers, the backup window is small to non existent. VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 has an automated FlashSnap Backup and Recovery component that solves the problem of limited backup windows by creating point-in-time snapshots of the Exchange data.

These snapshots can be backed up either locally or on a remote host, with limited or no impact on the production system. You can integrate snapshot backups with the backup application of your choice. To create the point-in-time backup image, VERITAS Edition creates "snapshot mirrors" of the data to back up.

The process of creating the mirror generally takes less than 15 percent of the time required using traditional hardware mirrors, during which the Exchange server is quiescent for only a short period of time. The snapshot backup requires enough extra storage to hold the snapshots. The snapshot volume can use any available disk storage.

For off-host backups, these snapshot mirrors should reside on the storage that is shared between the Exchange server and another server, which we will call the backup server. Once the snapshot is created, the Exchange server 'deports' the shared volume.

The backup server, also running VERITAS logical volume management software, then imports the volume. From this point, all backup processing occurs on the backup host.

The VERITAS Edition Backup component includes a utility to verify the integrity of the point-in-time copy. In this way you can be sure that these backups are valid, before you need them.

FlashSnap Quick Recovery offers on-disk snapshots for a fast recovery from logical errors such as data corruption. To recover from a logical problem, use the snapshot volume images to restore the Exchange server to the point in time that the snapshot was taken or to the point-of failure using Exchange's roll forward option. Replaying the transaction logs to the point before the data corruption can then make the Exchange server current.

This process is much faster than locating and reloading data from tape, reducing any downtime caused by data corruption or other logical errors.

In order to build Mission Critical Exchange Service we can combine VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 with Microsoft Cluster Server or the industry leading VERITAS Cluster Server to build a Highly Available Exchange 2000 Configuration.

Making use of the Clustering Technology allows for faster recover times of the Exchange Servers caused by Hardware or Software errors. While the Exchange and System administrators can still do their day-to-day storage tasks online.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT FROM DEPLOYING VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 and the HA Options

DIRECT BENEFITS - EXPENSE REDUCTION
Reduced Capital Expenditure

• Reduced disk acquisition. Improved storage utilisation of existing resources using virtualisation techniques

• Reduced number of servers and infrastructure costs, through use of consolidated SAN Storage model.

• Replaced hardware 3rd mirror creation tools. Leverage open 3rd mirror creation tool across storage systems from different vendors

• Reduced CPU and memory requirements through Exchange optimised storage

• Eliminate proprietary alternate-pathing software across different platforms and storage sub-systems, utilise common open functionality to simplify management

• Eliminated vendor lock-in, leverage best price point from hardware vendors

• Reduced standby server through deployment of N+1 clustering model rather than expensive active/passive model.

• Eliminate hardware-based replication, enabling freedom of choice between hardware vendors enabling best price, and management points to be achieved

• Reduced support & maintenance costs due to less physically assets being acquired

Reduced Operational Costs
• Reduced administration of storage via centralized consistent approach to all storage.

• Reduced cost of administration by using common toolset for Storage Management

• Reduced cost of administration by using a storage toolset that uses Exchange terms

• Central console to launch and manage multiple vendor device across Storage Network and Operation Systems masking the complexity

• Automatic discovery of all devices, servers, and Exchange databases enabling accurate and streamlined asset management.

• Automated fail-over policies between local servers or geographic locations in the event of a disaster.

INDIRECT BENEFITS - REVENUE PROTECTION
Reduced Data Loss - Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• Data mirrored locally to protect against disk failure

• Data mirrored remotely to provide redundant copies of data to be used as periodic replicas

• Leveraged snapshot technology to create Point-In-Time (PIT) images of critical data

• Replicated data over LAN, MAN or WAN without requirements for propriety networks

Reduced Downtime - Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
• Online administration of storage capacities, keeping applications available

• Policy based notification or corrective actions based on device events enabling proactive management.

• Rapid recovery from storage failure, protection against RAID 5 controller or sub-system failure from outside the sub-system

• Multiple paths for application to storage keeping systems available in the event of path failure

• Rapid recovery from data loss via mirroring or snapshot techniques

• Automated Recovery from application and infrastructure failure.

Improved time-to-market
• Online Storage Management (e.g grow, relayout) without interrupting Exchange

• On-line deployment of new applications

• Accurate projections of storage requirements - enabling applications to be deployed rapidly