People expect Microsoft Exchange to always be up and running. Staff must dependably send and receive email and wireless messages, refer to records and attachments, and access calendars and contact information. Continuity of service is paramount--any data unavailability can cause serious damage to your enterprise's operations and bottom line.

Microsoft Exchange is specifically designed to deliver high-volume collaboration capabilities and fast transaction rates. Yet because Exchange is so widely used, its storage can be especially challenging to manage effectively.

As message volumes and file attachments consume gigabytes of disk space, Exchange administrators are left struggling with this onslaught of data. Backup times increase relentlessly, compounded by regulatory compliance, where email messages must often be stored for lengthy periods of time. Recovery must always be fast and accurate, even after disaster.

How to better handle this situation? Today's IT professionals have a wealth of solutions at their fingertips to help implement best practices for optimizing Exchange environments. The key is to make the right choice--a comprehensive solution that delivers the entire gamut of storage services is needed so that you are not left with niche solutions, adding more work and frustration instead of alleviating it.

In today's 24X7 business environment, to maximize availability and business productivity, a practical storage solution for messaging/collaboration data needs to deliver advanced storage services that protect data and improve its accessibility.

Services should include:

* Disk mirroring for data redundancy

* Multipathing for protection against network node failures

* Remote data replication for disaster recovery

* Point-in-time snapshots for rapid, granular, non-disruptive recovery of individual mailboxes and entire data stores

* Impactless backup that can be completed within the backup window and doesn't burden Exchange servers.

Simplify, Centralize Storage Infrastructure and Management

Exchange administrators cite capacity management as their biggest problem. Their Exchange environment can host hundreds or thousands of active mailboxes, multiple servers, and terabytes of constantly growing email storage capacity.

Because enterprises typically grow in a piecemeal fashion, the result is often disconnected and/or duplicated infrastructure (e.g., surplus Exchange servers and storage arrays); unnecessarily complex processes; and excessive administrative overhead.

Another problem for administrators is Exchange servers running out of disk space. There's constant demand for more capacity to store emails/attachments--and to store them longer to comply with regulations such SEC 17a-3 and SEC 17a-4--which can lead to last minute purchasing of disk, manual reconfiguration of physical disk resources, and wasted storage capacity due to overprovisioning.

A comprehensive solution should offer a capacity-on-demand storage service that automatically prevents out-of-space conditions by monitoring disk space consumption and providing proactive, just-in-time capacity provisioning, as well as using virtualization to leverage and repurpose existing storage and know-how. In this storage model, capacity management is easier because all disk resources are joined into a "storage pool."

Exchange administrators can dynamically carve and provision capacity from this storage pool on an as-needed basis, with just a few mouse clicks at an easy-to-use, centralized console. The underlying disk interfaces are hidden, and all storage provisioning and storage services for an unlimited number of heterogeneous application and file servers can be controlled from this console.

Achieve High Availability

Strong business continuity tools can enhance a typical Exchange environment. Even if one or more niche data protection solutions have been implemented, chances are they are only providing a portion of the necessary protection. The result is inevitably inadequate protection from disk-, cabinet-, and network-level failures that sabotage data availability.

To protect against disk failure, look for a solution with synchronous and asynchronous mirroring capabilities to create redundant data sets. This way, a disk containing Exchange data can be mirrored to a second disk, which may reside on the same or on a different storage array of a different vendor/type/interface, providing a layer of cabinet redundancy over and above the RAID redundancy at the disk drive level. The disk subsystems themselves can be located in different locations to protect against a localized disaster.

Network-level failures can be averted by deploying failover and multipathing services that provide Exchange servers with multiple paths to storage, with server traffic intelligently rerouted to an available path for business continuity.

Disaster Recovery That Works

It is crucial to choose a storage infrastructure solution that delivers a remote replication service providing automated off-site data protection. Administrators should be able to specify a variety of policies to control the replication process, giving them a granular and flexible mechanism for keeping an extra set of data off-site for rapid recovery.