What is the cheapest way to have email redundancy?

[Gardener1]

We have one exchange server and 10 sites in California, what is the cheapest way to have email redundancy? just in case the circuit goes down at HQ? do you know of any ISP provided service that will take over if a circuit goes down? or any other methods that would not cost a lot of money. I am also interested in methods that cost money because we are preparing to plan for our 2010 budget.

Thanks

 

[dberg35]

Depending on your current service you should have an SLA. As for a redundant connection you could get basic internet service at each with a simple VPN solution. What you may want to look at if your not already using is an MPLS service. As for other redundancy you state only one server, what happens if that goes down? Have you considered a cluster environment?

 

[cajuntank]

dberg35 is right, you have several links in the chain that aren't addressed in your question. Circuit redundancies, hardware redundancies, application redundancies.

Circuit redundancies- How are the sites connecting now to HQ? private WAN (T1, MPLS, MetroE, etc...), VPN across the Internet (DSL, T1, MPLS, Cable, etc...) Do you have backup connectivity available?

Hardware redundancies- multiple servers in cluster environment like dberg35 mentioned following Microsoft's high availability best practices. Also things like power protection, etc..

Application redundancies- would get this from the clustering environment, but there is also Microsoft's hosted solutions. Moving all your mail to an Exchange hosted provider that has all of the redundancies already built in. Microsoft also has some hosted services which Forefront use to be. MX level virus/spam filtering and mail archiving. Having this purchased would filter the mail, then send it to both the hosted archive and to your internal Exchange server. If your Exchange server became unavailable, then the users could log into the hosted archive and be able to use it to send and receive mail till your local came back online (at least that's how it was explained to me a few years ago when Microsoft first bought Forefront).

Of course, you pay a nice premium for most of these technologies.

 

[Gardener1]

Thanks dberg35 I will check out the SLA with our ISP. if we have a SLA how do these usually work? do we have to modify our Outlook settings? or call them when our Exchange server goes down?

cajuntank, We have an ILAN at all of our sites, HQ is connected via site-to-site vpn. How much do these hosted sites cost?

 

[dberg35]

An SLA (Service Level Aggrement). The is what you Data provider has with the contract, example is if my circuit goes down they have 4 hours to bring it back up. Otherwise we get credited for every hour we are down.

A good place to start here is explain you infrastructure. Where is your Exchange server, domain controller and so on.