Data Management:
Most people use Microsoft Exchange or Outlook email in their corporate environment. Over the last five years email has become a mission critical application. Protecting Microsoft Exchange data has become a priority for most system administrators to ensure email data is available 24 /7.
When recovering from an outage, you look at Recovery Time objective (RTOs) and recovery point objective (RPO's) to determine time required to restore data. The major back up products such as EMC, Networker, IBM Trivoli, and Symantec Veritas support full, incremental, differential back ups of Exchange databases.
Another Exchange recovery option is using the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) which allows for a specific point in time back up of Exchange data bases. The three components of (VSS) framework are: a requester, a writer, and a provider. Back up software calls VSS provider to execute copy function. The OS and Symantec Backup-Exec performs the actual copy of the Exchange database. Symantec supports only the Symantec's VSS provider.
To increase speed of recovery, use hardware VSS that supports full-volume copies. You can mount and present these volumes to Exchange with full read and write capabilities. The back up software must support systems that create mirrored volumes and hardware VSS provide that supports this functionality.
If multiple hardware VSS providers are available, Symantec Veritas NetBackup allows to select hardware VSS provider and then configure copy type - full-volume / copy-on-write which are subject to limitations found on VSS Provider on Win 2003 server.
Continuous Availability
Asynchronous replication software allows for Exchange allows be available if primary server goes down. Replication feature allows for fail over to occur in seconds or minutes with no disruption to users.
