Best Practices: Protecting Microsoft Exchange

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Best Practices & Time-Saving Techniques for Protecting Exchange

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Agenda

• Challenges in protecting Exchange

• Recommended best practices for protecting and recovering Exchange

• Solutions for Exchange available today

• Quest data protection solutions

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Challenges

• Exponential data growth

• Email is increasingly seen as mission-critical

• Less tolerance for data loss and prolonged downtime

• Increasing number of requests to discover and recover data from within Exchange

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Plan for The Unexpected

• Server Failure – OS failure, hardware failure

• Database Failure– Database corruption or disk

failure

• Single Mailbox Loss– A mailbox is deleted and needs

to be recovered

• Single Mail Item Loss– A user inadvertently hard-

deletes an important mail item

• Site Disaster– Power outage, network outage,

natural disaster

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Gather Organizational Requirements

• Measure the value your organization places on its email data

• What are the acceptable levels of data loss?

• What is the acceptable length of time for service and data restoration?

• Where are my Exchange Servers located?

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Exchange Protection Approaches

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Set Recovery Objectives

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – The amount of time elapsed between a loss or disaster and the

restoration of business operations. It is the time required to physically recover the data or application and have it ready for use

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The point in time that recovered data will be recovered to.

– For example, if you recover a file that was backed up yesterday then your recovery point is one day

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Create a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

• Obtain agreement on objectives in the form of a SLA

• Include the following categories:– Availability

– Hours of operation

– Performance measures

– Recovery parameters

– Support parameters

– Environmental dependencies and assumptions

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Protecting Exchange

Your protection strategy should directly support your

recovery requirements

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High Availability

• Database Availability Groups (DAG)– New framework introduced in Exchange 2010

– A group of mailbox servers (up to 16) that replicate to one another, providing database-level protection from outages

– Uses Exchange Continuous Replication (logs shipping) and a subset of Windows failover clustering technologies to provide continuous HA and site resiliency

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Backup

• Traditional Backup– Protection for information stores, individual storage groups, or

individual databases

– Enterprise protection for heterogeneous environments (centralized management and monitoring)

– Target disk or tape

• Real-time Backup (Continuous Data Protection)– Watches all changes occurring during a defined period

– An initial sync/seed of the data to be protected is created

– All changes that occur after the initial sync/seed are captured and available for restore

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Disaster Recovery

• Host-Based Replication– Cross-platform replication for applications like Microsoft Exchange, as

well as Microsoft SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL residing in Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X environments

– Centralized management and monitoring of replication

• Replication of Backup Copies– Replicates changes to protected datasets from one (or many) backup

servers to another backup server

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Recovering Exchange

Clearly document and test recovery strategy to minimize

the chance for mistakes

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Elements of a Restore Strategy

Include the following in your restore strategy:

• Build a communications plan– Identify the personnel involved in disaster recovery efforts, their

responsibilities and chain of command

• Set restore priorities– Prioritize what should be restored

• Provision a “dial-tone” system – Allow users to send and receive new email before the historical email

data has been fully restored

• Restore type– Use the recovery storage group to restore the data and merge the

restored data into the “dial-tone” database

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PerformanceMonitoring

Development

Data Protection

Migration

Administration

Quest Data Protection Family

PHYSICAL I VIRTUAL I CLOUD

CAPABILITIES AND BENEFITS

• Best-of-breed solutions that span physical, virtual, and application-level data protection

• Heterogeneous platform support

• Reduce the amount of data required for backups by 90% while gaining scalability

• Object and application-level recovery to ensure availability and immediate access

FUNCTIONS PLATFORMS

IdentityManagement

PRODUCTS

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Quest: A Leader in Data Protection & Application Management

#1

•Linux Backup: NetVault Backup (IDC Japan)

#1

•Oracle Backup: NetVault Backup (DCIG Buyer’s Guide)

#1

•Purpose-built backup for VMware (in speed, scalability, and number of customers)

Top 3

•Virtual Server Management Software Vendor: Quest Software (IDC US)

Top 10

•Worldwide Storage Management Software Vendor: Quest Software (Gartner)

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NetVault BackupCross-platform backup and recovery

• Extensive platform/application support– Unix, Windows, Linux. Mac OS

– VMware ESX/ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM

– Protection for 12 popular business applications

• Scalable yet simple– 50% faster recovery, 30% faster backup than comparable

products

– 45 minute install and setup

• Broad tape and disk support

• Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) agent

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NetVault FastRecoverReal-time backup and instant recovery

• Patented FlashRestore™ - Near instant recovery for Microsoft Exchange, as well as Oracle, SQL Server,

and Windows file-system data

• Efficient replication for remote offices- Bandwidth-friendly replication supports ROBO disaster recovery scenarios

• Integrates with existing backup products• Export and back up NVFR datasets via CIFS

• Eliminates backup windows

• Recover data from any point in time—even down to the second!

NVFR Timeline Indicator

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Recovery Manager for ExchangeDiscover, Recover Individual Mail Items, Attachments & Conversations• Find and retrieve message-level data in minutes from

multiple sources• Exact items from a single-pass backup

• Eliminates the need for both a database backup and a brick-level backup

• Perform federated, intelligent searches• Search multiple email data sources simultaneously

• Search keywords in message body, ID, headers, message classes, categories, deleted items, conversation threads and attachment type and content

• Support for Backup Software• Find and retrieve data across Quest's NetVault Backup

and NetVault FastRecover, native Microsoft backups and most major third-party backup software


http://www.quest.com/data-protection

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Best Practices: Protecting Microsoft Exchange