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Exchange 2003 VSS Backup Solution
For IBM Storage DS8000/DS6000
And Symantec Backup Exec 11d
Page 6 David West, David Hartman
©
Copyright IBM Corp. 2007
Cost of Downtime
When a critical system like an Exchange server goes down, data,
productivity, and money may be lost. For a typical business that has 500
active users on an Exchange server, if access to that server is lost for two
hours the company may experience a productivity loss of as much as 1000
employee hours, which can equate to tens of thousands of dollars. That does
not consider other losses, such as missed communications from partners,
damaged customer relations, or simply lost deals.
Target Environment
The IBM System Storage™ DS6000 and DS8000 series storage arrays target
medium to large-size businesses seeking enterprise level reliability,
availability, and serviceability (RAS), combined with support of advanced
copy features such as FlashCopy
®
, and Metro/Global Mirror
®
. In a large
environment, it is not uncommon to have multiple DS6000 and DS8000
arrays deployed in a complimentary fashion. The DS8000 series is designed
to scale to the needs or the largest enterprise data centers.
Customers deploying these arrays for Exchange-based solutions will typically
have installations that range from several servers hosting a thousand or more
users on a DS6000 at a single site, to fully-loaded DS8000 multi-node arrays
hosting tens of thousands of users. Usually, the latter types of deployments
include geographically dispersed clusters with multi-site data replication
enabled.
The current version of Backup Exec 11d for Microsoft Exchange does not
include instant recovery capabilities, however future releases may support
this functionality.
During lab testing the average recovery time for a single Storage Group with
a 50GB database was ~ 20 minutes (vs. ~ 5 minutes for instant recovery).
While faster than tape-based recovery methods, these restore times should
be considered against RTOs and service level agreements (SLAs) if
applicable.
In many cases, production recovery requests are for individual mailboxes,
rather than entire databases or storage groups. With the introduction of
Backup Exec Granular Recovery Technology, Symantec enables faster
RTOs for mailbox or item level restores, which can be restored from VSS
backups.