Protecting Email? Protect the Data First
"I am sorry but our mail system is down. Could you call back later?"
The above quote may sound overly dramatic, but chances are it also rings true. Email has gone from being a "nice to have" to being the one application that is shared and demanded from the warehouse to the executive boardroom.
Regardless of your job responsibilities, you most likely have an interest and dependence on email. Without it productivity literally comes to a crawl and can even stop completely. While it was once just a convenient way for employees to communicate internally, today's email systems are tightly integrated with other important business applications and are one of the primary methods by which to communicate with current and prospective customers. Protecting email systems against costly downtime has become a top priority for most IT departments. The big question now is what is the best way to protect it?
Options for Protecting Data
There are numerous technologies available to protect the data associated with your email application. Tape backup is one of the more common solutions, providing a portable backup medium that can be stored offsite for long-term archiving. However, some of the shortcomings of a tape-based solution make it less-thanoptimal for protecting email systems. These include long recovery times and large amounts of lost data due to the fact that backups are generally performed only once a day, leaving large windows of vulnerability.
Another option is the use of synchronous hardware. This solution ensures all data is replicated to a secondary storage device immediately, before the application continues processing the next transaction, to ensure no loss of data in the event of a failure. Synchronous replication will inherently impose performance impacts on your email systems. While synchronous hardware mirroring does address the data "freshness" problem, these solutions are proprietary and also carry a hefty price tag.
This leaves you with yet a third option to protect your email data—host-based asynchronous replication. Asynchronous replication technologies have several significant advantages over a tape-only approach or synchronous mirroring. For one, because this solution runs on the host, it is storage independent, supporting the hardware you have today and may have tomorrow. Also, asynchronous replication technologies are more efficient as they typically replicate changes at the byte level rather than the file or block level. Lastly, real-time replication provides a far more up-to-date copy of the data compared to traditional tape backup, and disk-based copies of data are more quickly recovered in the event of a disaster. At a cost typically tens of thousands of dollars less than hardware-based solutions, asynchronous replication can provide the levels of protection and availability you need for businesscritical email systems and data.
How to Ensure Availability
Now that your data is protected, availability needs to become a priority. With email downtime estimated at tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, it becomes crucial to also maintain the availability of your email systems to continue to allow your users access during a failure or other disaster.
One company who understands this as well as anyone is Tribune, a major source of news and information throughout the country. At Tribune, where information is its main business, internal messaging is a most important piece of their day-to-day operations. In fact, Tribune has a staff of 12 IT professionals dedicated solely to managing its messaging systems.
Recently Tribune decided to simplify its existing messaging infrastructure, comprised of almost 30 different email systems including Microsoft® Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, by migrating each of its 22,000 users to a single system running Microsoft Exchange 2003. After the migration, the IT staff realized that an outage of any kind could affect a lot of people. Not only would the 22,000 internal users be affected, but an outage could also affect the company's loyal viewers and readership that depend upon the Tribune as a source for up-to-the-minute news.
The IT team considered a wide range of options to protect their Exchange environment, including storage-based technologies (SAN), host-based technologies (software) and a variety of application-specific technologies. The team chose Double-Take, because it was a host-based async replication solution. Now, with two Exchange production clusters, one in Chicago and one in Los Angeles, each location serves as a backup, or failover server, for the other in the event of an outage at either location. Should one of the Exchange servers suffer a failure, users will be automatically redirected to the other Exchange server where an up-to-the-moment copy of their email resides, getting them back online within minutes.
The Double-Take Solution
Double-Take® is a host-based asynchronous solution that provides real-time byte-level replication to protect your email data to any location across any distance. Advanced features, such as flexible bandwidth scheduling, compression and extended queuing, enable Double-Take to provide disaster recovery for business-critical data using customers' existing hardware and software infrastructure.
NSI's patented solutions serve an array of industries, including international banking, finance, legal services, retail, manufacturing, government, education and healthcare. IBM, Dell®, HP and SunGard choose Double-Take for the data replication products and services they offer their customers. NSI is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and boasts the highest levels of testing and certification on all Microsoft platforms.