Solutions

Business Continuity for Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Recovery Solutions:

To say that email is a critical application is an obvious understatement - few applications are more integral to an organization's day-to-day operation. This is more than a managed service and a redundant server; with full DNS record failover, automated Microsoft Exchange service start and stop as well as planned fail-back, we offer a high-availability business continuity solution.

Downtime Means Lost Revenue:

For many companies, an hour of Exchange downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. How can you justify a disaster recovery and high availability solution for Microsoft Exchange that does not provide immediate and up-to-the-second Exchange recovery? You can't. Exchange recovery as part of a thorough disaster recovery plan is crucial to business continuity. True Exchange recovery for the sake of business continuity requires real-time data protection which enables disaster recovery and high availability. Having a solution that is cost-effective, hardware independent, and scalable is something many IT managers have seriously considered.

Our software automates the setup and configuration as well as the replication and failover monitoring of Exchange servers - guaranteeing rapid and successful deployment. An automated and monitored system performs recovery and fail back of Exchange servers with a minimal window of downtime. By performing recovery tasks while users remain online, Exchange downtime is reduced to just the few moments that it takes to stop and start the necessary Exchange services and relegate processing back to the production server. Exchange recovery is a quick and easy process.

What to Expect in an Exchange Recovery during Outages:

In the event of an outage, a failover will either automatically initiate if the production server is unreachable for the amount of time you set, or alert you and wait for you to initiate the failover manually. Alerting for either type of failover scenario is available via SNMP, SMTP, and the Windows Event Log. Regardless of which failover methodology you choose, the procedure for restoring services for end-users is the same.

DNS Record Failover:

Our DNS Failover component will update Active Directory DNS servers to re-route end-users to the recovery server. You may specify any and/or manually update all DNS record types, depending on what systems you need re-directed.

Exchange Failover:

After DNS failover re-routes end-users, our Exchange Failover component will dynamically re-assign all mailboxes and Public Folders from the failed server to the recovery server allowing end-users to regain access seamlessly. Internal testing has shown relatively small load on existing DNS and Active Directory infrastructure. Approximately 14,000 users can be moved to a BC server in around 7 minutes. Conservative Failover estimates are placed at 45 minutes, but most failover instances report less than 10 minutes.

Third-Party Services Re-Established:

Finally, the appropriate Exchange and 3rd party services (anti-virus, mobile mail, archiving, etc) are started on the recovery server. This last step re-establishes a live Exchange server for your end-users to connect to. Outlook clients may need to be re-started, but no end-user configuration will be required. In addition, other components such as Outlook Web Access (OWA) and other e-mail integrated system will simply pick up where they left off.