Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Solutions

Microsoft Exchange server downtime can cost companies millions of pounds a year. Technical consultants therefore work with these organisations to reduce / minimise downtime through the implementation of high-availability systems and disaster-recovery systems. Building a geographically dispersed Exchange cluster is not a simple task; it requires proper planning, testing, deployment and validation. In this blog we aim to cover the basic steps during the planning stage for your company’s high availability/ disaster recovery plans. You have taken the first and most critical step toward deploying the system – recognising the need!
The process begins with the initial decision to implement an Exchange disaster-recovery system and continues as long as that system is in production.  In the planning phase, you must answer these critical questions:

·         What is the recovery time objective for the system?

·         Based on the rate of change and expected growth, what bandwidth is required between the primary site and the disaster recovery site?

·         What pieces of the system besides the Exchange server and processes them-selves must be monitored and recovered? Is there a minimum set of functionality that's acceptable for some time following recovery? If so, what is that subset?

·         Are there site-specific error conditions that should be optimised for in the monitoring phase?

·         Will automatic fail-over be allowed, or should administrator notification be the first recovery action?

·         Which e-mail clients must be protected during fail-over? What access methods do they use? And how will these be migrated to the disaster recovery site during recovery?

The choice of a disaster recovery site should be the first decision you make. For some organisations backing up to a remote office is the perfect solution while others may look to collocated hosting centres that provide full redundancy for power and network connectivity. You need to ensure which ever route is take there are techniques and procedures in place for building a test environment, staff used to build the DR/HA environment should also be heavily involved in testing solutions and they should be hands-on in the deployment and validation stages.
The testing phase is often difficult because properly emulating a production Exchange environment within a test lab requires simulating cross-site network connectivity, user load, the influence of adjunct programs such as backup jobs and other factors unique to the specific environment. The closer you can get to a mirrored production environment within the test lab, the fewer issues you will see arise during deployment.
In testing, you are looking to answer questions such as these:

·         Does the failover software perform as expected on both detection and recovery?

·         Does the data replication software perform as expected in terms of speed and data consistency?

·         Is there any noticeable performance impact on end users from the presence of the monitoring or data replication software?

·         Are the various clients able to seamlessly migrate to Exchange running on the disaster recovery server?

Delivery of the solution should be straight forward if you assembled a team of experts and successfully emulated the production environment during the testing phase. Make sure you schedule sufficient time for the initial data mirror across site and subsequent testing of failovers to the disaster recovery site and back to the production server. Each of those tests should validate that client redirection works as planned and that all services needed for a fully functional Exchange environment are recovered.
Following the initial deployment, it is recommended that failover tests be made after any change to the Exchange environment (such as installation of service packs, introduction of new services, etc.). Carrying out regular system checks will avoid the disaster recovery system not working correctly and resulting in being unable to bring Exchange into service because of an administrative change that was not accounted for.

Open Minds HAS Ltd has been working with customers to deploy Exchange Server High Availability for over 10 years. To speak to one of our experts please contact us on 0121 533 7178

Microsoft SQL Server protection

Every business has mission critical applications and data. Therefore, it is very important to keep servers up and running all the time 24 X 7. In today’s world there is a need to store and process terabytes of data and it is vital to make this data highly available.

High availability is all about your site, database or email being accessible all the time. High availability solutions minimise the downtime for these mission critical applications, such as SQL, Exchange or IIS.

Microsoft SQL Server is a powerful database used to store and maintain data in businesses of various levels, be they small, medium or large. As such loss of a MS SQL server can have a huge impact on business operations.

Our consultants can take you through pre and post installation concepts and common issues you come across while working with SQL Server. We can help answer common question like what is the best concept for you? What should you use?

1.    Database mirroring?

2.    Log shipping?

3.    Clustering?

4.    Or just real-time replication.

Business Data is the core of your business and as such it should be protected. If you are business owner you should be asking yourself; how much time can the business afford without access to critical data or emails? How much money could I lose if my website, ordering system was down? Depending on the type of business you may also want to check if you have any service level agreements you could fail to deliver due to systems being down.

If you are the IT administrator you will be worried about getting the systems up and running again. Your main pain point will be how quickly can I get this server back online? The answer is days if you are using tape backup and minutes if you are using a failover solution.

Although in this blog I have covered Microsoft application we can cover Linux applications and also bespoke Microsoft or Linux applications.

If you have a project like this coming up please feel free to give Open Minds a call on 0121 533 7178.

Birmingham Hippodrome

We are fortunate in having so many great customers, and this month we have been lucky enough to have released a case study from Birmingham Hippodrome. A customer introduced to us by one of our partners, eSpida.

We have been working with eSpida for around 7 years now, and we have worked with them on many projects. Including implementing systems as diverse as SAP on Linux, Microsoft Exchange Servers and Linux file servers. They have a great attitude and we thoroughly enjoy working with them.

To read more about the work we have done with Birmingham Hippodrome and eSpida, the case study is available here. For more info on eSpida visit: www.espida.co.uk

Ensuring High Availability on a budget

In trying to meet the conflicting demands of costs and maintaining uptime, do you have to look for more creative ways to spend your IT budget?

Many organisations are turning to Linux for a proven and reliable solution. As the SteelEye Solution Centre for UK, Ireland and the Gulf region, Open Minds have been providing organisations with Linux clustering and Disaster Recovery for over 10 years, providing enterprise-grade clustering for the Linux market. SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux provides enterprise-grade high availability for the most demanding deployments, supporting configurations built on commodity servers and storage whilst removing the need for shared storage and enterprise edition licences.

If you would like to find out more about how we provide enterprise grade Linux solutions to our customers, then please reply to this email with your telephone number and we will contact you to discuss your requirements in greater detail. The first five enquires will receive a copy of “Free Software, Free Society” selected essays of Richard M. Stallman, and all enquiries will be sent a free Linux distribution CD courtesy of the Linux Emporium. For more information on Linux adoption, click here

Celebrate with us...

Open Minds are pleased to announce that the SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows was recently awarded the 2009 Global Product Excellence – Disaster Recovery Award by the Info Security Products Guide Awards. The Guide is the world’s most comprehensive guide on Info Security with the awards recognising and honouring excellence in all areas of information security.

The SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows provides a highly functional and cost effective combination of data replication and application recovery for your file servers and IIS servers.
To see for yourself why SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows was awarded the 2009 Global Product Excellence – Disaster Recovery Award, please send us and email to evalrequest@openminds.co.uk to request a free 30 day product evaluation license.

Furthermore, to celebrate SteelEye’s success, if you order the award winning SPS for Windows before 18th June 2009, we will give you LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Bespoke Applications, normally costing £350.00, free of charge. To take advantage of this offer, please quote 11990f when ordering your SPS for Windows.

Warm regards

The Open Minds Team

What is the cost to your business if your servers fail? FREE Calculator & free workshop

When you look at your most critical servers, can you immediately identify what the impact on the business would be if these servers went down?

What would be the lost revenue?

What would be the lost productivity?

How about the damage to your reputation?

Or,
All of the above?

Visit our cost of Downtime Calculator, to build a business case for building a more resilient IT infrastructure.

By completing the Downtime Calculator, you now have an indication of the cost to your company should your servers fail, but you also need to identify two key objectives for your critical servers:

1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO):
How long does it take your business to recover from a server failure?

2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO):
At what point will you recover up to?

For example, your current operating system takes 5 hours to recover from server failure (RTO) but can only recover to the latest back-up which occurred at midnight (RPO):
Wednesday, 12noon, server failure occurs, it will be 5pm before server failure recovery (RTO), but, the latest back-up occurred midnight Tuesday (RPO), which would result in up to a 17 hour window of Downtime, depending on your company’s operating hours.

If you apply the 17 hour window of Downtime to your Calculator within System Restoration Cost, you will identify your IT department’s internal costs. This is only a fraction of the cost and lost productivity that the company will experience during server failure.

Your business case complete: In most cases, the cost of one hour’s server Downtime to the company will pay for a high availability or a disaster recovery solution. Delivering replication, helping you to achieve a virtually immediate recovery point, and, failover which helps you to achieve a minimal recovery time with the added benefit that system users will be unaware that there has been any server failure.

If you are interested in finding out how to plan for server failure and supporting your business case argument, then, please reply to this email or call 0121 313 3943 before 15th May and we will offer you a free place on our Disaster Recovery and High Availability Planning Workshop, worth £250.

For further information about the content of the Disaster Recovery and High Availability Planning Workshop, please refer to the document available here.

Do you test your systems recovery?

Do you remember the amount of investment spent in time and money when you decided to implement your recovery solution?

Are you confident that your recovery systems will work should the worst happen?

To maintain the resilience of your LifeKeeper solution, we have devised a 5-Point Checklist:

• When did you last complete a system test?

LifeKeeper systems need to be tested on a regular basis. It is recommended that you perform a failover test every month, but as a minimum, tests should be performed every 3 months. This is to make sure that when recovery on the back up server is invoked, it will run smoothly.

• How often do you monitor the status of the mirror?

If the mirroring stops, it means that your data is no longer replicated. Therefore, it is critical to regularly monitor the status of your mirror. You can never really do this too often, so make it a regular practice to look at your mirror status at least daily.

• Have you set up email notification for your servers?

Being notified by email or text every time a failover or switchover happens is extremely easy to set up. It is an easy way to be notified every time you need to pay some attention to your LifeKeeper servers.

• Do you check your event logs regularly?

For the general health and housekeeping of the server, check event logs daily. Al events such as hardware failures, LifeKeeper information, quotas, application specific actions, logons are logged in your event logs. Failover can sometimes be prevented by detecting errors early enough and taking corrective action.

• Do you verify all configuration changes? Eg passwords

If you perform changes to configurations such as passwords, settings, files, you will also need to ensure that these changes won’t affect the functionality of LifeKeeper. To do this you need to check your event logs. It is also advisable to test changes by performing a switchover. Of course, it is best to do this outside of normal hours, or in periods of low usage.

If you need assistance assessing the resilience of your high availability solution, Open Minds are able to perform a Health Check, either remotely or on-site to ensure that your LifeKeeper servers are running smoothly, ready, should the worst happen.

For more details about the Health Check please read the Open Minds Health Check document or contact us on sales@openminds.co.uk or 0121 313 3943.