Exchange Resiliance

[Chopsy666]

Hi Guys,

Apaart from the fact that i've probably spelt resiliance wrong. I have been assigned the task of finding to solutions for our exchange 2003 server (by next week!!!)

1. is if the Exchange server (or 1 of them should we implement 2) goes down, we can still use emails as normal. Would this be normal server clustering, or are there other solutions for Exchange, maybe also if for example a bad service pack left it unworkable.

2. we want to keep a reign on the size of the mailboxes, and we have been told there maybe a way of archiving emails that are say over 3 months old, but it still appears to the user as though they are available so when they click on it, the system goes of and retrieves it from some sort of archived tape drive etc.

If any one has experience of implementing any of these it would be great to hear from you, as these are all new projects for myself and my colleague.

Regards

 

[Zelandakh]

1. You need a cluster or a really nice server. I have just the one and its uptime is pretty good. SPs tend not to wreck it. How many users, what sort of throughput and what budget?

2. KVS Enterprise Vault will do that. PC users only though, not Apple. It lifts emails off NTFS partitions.

Just how big are you looking? 3 months seems impossibly short.

 

[Bluenose]

We have just done this by using clustering and implementing EAS email archiving by Zantaz.
3 months is pushing it a bit unless you are very experienced or get some outside help.

 

[Zelandakh]

archiving over 3 months, not implementing in under.

Following approval the above can be done in under a month subject to hardware provision. It isn't going to be cheap.

 

[Chopsy666]

Hi Guys,

we ahve about 500 users. I have spoken to the director and he is happy for 6 months to stay in the inbox and the rest to be archived (but accessbile). As we are a public sector company hence the need to keep data for extended periods of time.

I will look into some of the fore mentioned options

Thanks

 

[unclerico]

Chopsy, I work for a publicly held biopharmaceutical company and we are subject to SOX, CFR 21 Part 11, as well as FDA regulations. All that said the product we rely on for archiving e-mails and has the exact functionality that you want (user can click an e-mail or entire folders of e-mail and archive them and the product will leave a 5k header file in their inbox so when the user wants to retrieve it the e-mail pops back into "play") is an add-on to a much larger enterprise backup solution called CommVault, I believe the add-on is called Data Migrator.

 

[Chopsy666]

Thanks for that i will look in to comm vault too.

Does anyone have any opinion on whether it would be better to implement the clustering first or the software solution.

Best Regards
Chopsy

 

[Chopsy666]

Hi,

I have now been told by my manager that we will not be using clustering for exchange. Apparently he has been told by some consultants that people are moving away from it, as there is a single point of failure (in the shared hardrives). Is it not possible to have two hard drive arrays in the cluster? They are recommending to servers to give load balancing (the information store split i guess). So when one server or hard drive array goes down, half the company is still up, and apparently on each hard drive arraywould be a snap shot of the other hardrive array so we could rebuild the down server from the one that is intact.

Does anyone have any opinions on this. It doesnt quite all sound right to me.