Microsoft Exchange - protecting it, managing it and keeping it running (page 1 of 4)

This is due to many factors. Email in general - and Microsoft Exchange in particular - has become a victim of its own success. As email has taken off and become the preferred communication tool in business, organisations have found more and more innovative ways to use it.

Email is used as an engine for mass marketing, targeting large groups of recipients. Most day-to-day inter-office and external communication is done by email. We are all overrun with ever increasing amounts of spam.

We distribute files using email. We store our business and personal contacts within our email systems. We send out quotations and proposals. We distribute memos and other documents. We distribute jpegs and mpegs. And we even build entire online communities through email. Often multiple copies of the same file attachments exist within the Exchange data store.

What's more, Governments, regulatory bodies and industry forums are recognising the extent to which organisations are using email through every facet of their businesses. This results in a growing number of rules and regulations requiring organisations to store email and keep it for increasingly long periods of time.

Email has become a drug. The more we use it the more we need it. As our dependency grows, the greater the risk of our withdrawal symptoms. So how can we avoid cold turkey for our business?

Technology components
From a technology point of view there are a number of considerations when it comes to keeping Exchange available and preventing data loss.

Data Protection - it is critical that this is the starting point. If all else fails there needs to be an alternative copy of the data to fall back to, in order to support reconstruction of an Exchange environment. This is the most basic safety net.

Recovery - there are two areas to consider from a recovery point of view: how to recover the server, the operating system and the application; how to recover the data. Each of these has a different answer.

High availability and downtime avoidance - for critical applications 'high availability' (HA) is a prerequisite. Ensuring protection against hardware failure or application failure - without incurring significant downtime - should be a key consideration for Exchange environments.

Data Protection
There are a number of factors to consider when defining a suitable data protection strategy.

The size of the Exchange data store is going to impact every facet of an Exchange data protection strategy. Typically these are very large data stores due to the sheer volume of emails that most businesses generate and the number of attachments that are sent and received every day. These attachments usually represent the majority of Exchange data.

The backup window is another important factor. Because of the data volumes associated with Exchange it normally takes an incredibly long time to back it up. Few organisations still have the luxury of being able to shut down an application and back it up 'offline' over night. Even if that is the case, there is often too much data to backup within that night-time window so this still presents a challenge.

A further challenge is that Exchange is a complex application and once in a stable state of operation, administrators are reluctant to shut it down in case it causes some kind of problem.

This leaves a number of problems.
• How can Exchange be backed up online with minimal impact on the users?

• How can the data be protected more selectively?

• How can greater efficiency be applied to the backups?

• How can backups be run frequently enough to minimise data loss?

Recovery
One common mistake organisations make is in overlooking the reason why they run backups.