Implementing Highly Available Messaging Business And Technical Challenges

Businesses of all sizes rely extensively on their ability to communicate information quickly and efficiently. Reliability and availability problems related to messaging are highly visible and can cause immediate and significant business impact. A large number of potential problems can cause downtime and data loss, including:
• Loss of data due to hardware failure or software issues
• Infrastructure issues, such as storage, networking, or WAN outages
• User or administrator errors, such as accidental deletion or inadvertent configuration changes
• Planned maintenance activities

A well-designed availability plan must take into account all of these potential issues, while still working within organizational limitations such as budgets and IT expertise. Furthermore, an availability plan must minimize the impact of losses in service. To address the needs of high-availability, disaster recovery, and performance, Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2010 platform has been vastly improved over previous versions. However, it is still the responsibility of IT organizations to plan for and implement highly-available solutions.

This White Paper provides an overview of the availability features in Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2010 platform. Details include planning, migration, and cost-related considerations. The paper also includes details on how Neverfail’s technology can help IT organizations build an efficient, manageable, and cost-effective messaging infrastructure.

E-Mail Continuity Features in Exchange Server 2010

Exchange Server 2010 represents numerous improvements and changes from previous versions of Exchange Server. Among the long list of improves are the ability to change archive retention settings, support for storage performance and a new high-availability approach called Database Availability Groups (DAGs). In addition Exchange Server 2010 removes support for previous clustering and replication mechanisms, including Single Copy Clusters (SCC), Local Continuous Replication (LCR), Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) and Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR).

Understanding Database Availability Groups (DAGs)
A DAG is a collection of up to 16 Exchange Mailbox servers that provides a highly-available solution. This approach is designed to simplify the implementation and management of availability and reliability for Exchange Server 2010 deployments. Administrators can easily define which mailbox servers belong to which DAG, and the setup process is largely automatic. Figure 1 provides an example of a DAG configuration based on three Exchange Server 2010 Mailbox servers

By: Gee Mandy

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Mandy Gee writes about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
Further information on Continuous Availability.