White Papers

BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 5
1 Introduction
IT professionals and businesses are constantly challenged by the exponential growth of the amount of
data they have to manage. While data management encompasses several areas of an organization,
ensuring the data protection and business continuity for the data content is one of the most critical
aspects. Loss of data for mission critical applications and lack of application availability for users is not
tolerable outside business continuity strategy boundaries.
A messaging infrastructure built upon Microsoft
®
Exchange has risen as one of the most critical
corporate-wide services that demands diligent planning for its protection. The significant redesign of
internal database storage functionalities in the Microsoft Exchange 2010 version now requires larger
databases compared with previous versions and at the same time allows large to very large mailboxes.
This has caused a substantial increase in the size of the data to be made highly available and
recoverable.
In a similar context, IT professionals have to seriously consider what technologies can be exploited in
order to achieve the difficult goals of data availability, resiliency, and fast recovery. Varying levels of
continuity can be achieved depending on the nature of the application and on the tools and
techniques employed to protect them.
1.1 Purpose and scope
This whitepaper introduces the advantages of protecting Microsoft Exchange mailbox data using the
out-of-the-box Dell™ EqualLogic™ snapshot feature, which can be leveraged and integrated within
vertical backup software solutions as well. It will guide Exchange and SAN administrators to
understand and strengthen their Exchange recovery infrastructure with the help of lab validated test
results. The scope of this paper is limited to local data protection and data availability only.
1.2 Target audience
This paper is primarily intended for IT professionals (IT managers, Solution Architects, Exchange and
Storage Administrators, System and VMware Engineers) who are involved in defining and/or
implementing data protection and recovery plans for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 infrastructures
and would like to investigate the benefits of using Dell EqualLogic storage. This document assumes
that the reader is familiar with Microsoft Exchange functionalities, EqualLogic SAN operation, and
VMware system administration.
1.3 Key benefits of snapshots for applications
Using EqualLogic SAN based snapshots within a wider data protection strategy provides key benefits:
• SAN-based snapshot feature is provided out-of-the-box: Volumes holding applications
data can have one or more point-in-time copies taken seamlessly on the SAN, while
application integration is maintained at the host level to ensure data consistency.
• Simple management: A host based set of GUI applications provides management,
scheduling, and monitoring functionalities for all related activities with snapshots.
• Host and network resources off-load during backup: SAN snapshots allow minimizing
the backup windows by off-loading the host local resources contention and LAN traffic to