Advanced Storage for Microsoft Exchange

By Thomas Schmidt

As every enterprise knows all too well, the amount of email generated by workers every day is skyrocketing. And yet, many enterprises continue to rely on point products to solve their storage management challenges. That's a problem, according to Forrester Research Analyst Andrew Reichman, who observed recently:

"As storage budgets skyrocket, enterprises need to take a more holistic approach to their storage environment by developing a comprehensive storage strategy and shifting their focus to storage processes and management tools -- not just technology. . . Improvements to storage processes and management tools will have the biggest impact on internal customers, as well as on the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the storage organization." ("The Next-Generation Storage Organization," Forrester Research, September 25, 2006)

The need for such an approach to storage management is perhaps more urgent today than at any other time. That's especially the case for organizations that employ Microsoft Exchange. Given today's need to communicate with employees, customers and partners 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Microsoft Exchange servers are becoming crucial for ensuring business success. As more and more demands are placed on those servers for expanding communication, the importance of keeping them online and available has become even more critical.

Why is that? Because email failures are now high-profile events, with the potential to generate negative press for an organization, frustrate users, decrease productivity, and result in a loss of business. The bottom line is that downtime has become intolerable. As email becomes more prevalent, even more strain is brought to bear, increasing the critical nature of the application. In a 24x7 global marketplace, email downtime equals a competitive disadvantage.

Of course, every Exchange administrator is bound to face data corruption and virus issues. That's inevitable. But just being able to recover isn't enough anymore. Today, administrators must be able to recover as quickly as possible to minimize downtime.

This article looks at an approach enterprises can take to ensure not only that important data can be recovered but also that business can be up and running quickly.

Determining data recovery needs
As an organization considers its data recovery requirements, both recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives should also be kept in mind.

• Recovery time objective refers to how much time a business can afford to lose before the application is accepting transactions again
• Recovery point objective refers to how much data loss a business can afford

The approach that experts recommend for Exchange addresses recovery time objectives as well as recovery point objectives and serves as a first line of defense to quickly recover Exchange storage groups or databases. It is also significantly faster than restoring from standard backup media.

Organizations requiring uninterrupted and consistent access to mission-critical data must also have the ability to create point-in-time images of production Exchange databases and transaction logs. Once created, these snapshots should remain on the Exchange server, where they are available to enable quick restoration -- no data transfer from disk or tape should be required. An automated restore process will ensure quick recovery in minutes, as opposed to hours or days. Such a process makes it possible to fully restore data to a point in time when the snapshot was taken or to roll forward to the point of failure.

Point-in-time recovery refers to the process of recovering Microsoft Exchange server databases to the point in time of any successful snapshot. In contrast, point-of-failure recovery makes it possible to fully restore a database to a point just before service was interrupted. This is accomplished by restoring the database to the last snapshot backup before the interruption took place, and then automatically rolling forward the transaction logs to the point of the interruption.

Advanced storage management
Organizations should look for solutions with features such as centralized storage management, online configuration and administration, and local and remote replication. This solution enables organizations to reduce operational costs and capital expenditures across the data center. Other features organizations should look for include:

• Online configuration with dynamic disks This optimizes storage performance and availability without bringing operating systems or applications offline
• Centralized management and reporting This improves operational efficiencies and visibility with centralized management and reporting across thousands of hosts, and enables non-disruptive storage operations through GUI-based management
• I/O path availability and performance  This spreads I/O across multiple paths for maximum performance, path failure protection and fast failover
• Local and remote data protection This protects data across any environment with point-in-time copies and data replication
• Multi-vendor hardware infrastructure This reduces capital expenditures with support for heterogeneous operating systems and storage hardware.

Conclusion
When email failures occur, business users expect Exchange administrators to recover data as quickly as possible. Deploying a quick recovery solution for Microsoft Exchange servers can provide an immediate return to the business.

Thomas Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.