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Edward Lim
Business Technology
November 17, 2009
Full text of original article at Business Technology web site

Solving the Microsoft Exchange Backup Dilemma

Microsoft Exchange is one of the most used ‘filing cabinets’ in today’s office, where meetings are scheduled, documents are shared and business is conducted. For most organizations, this makes the Microsoft Exchange server mission critical – imagine how much you would lose in productivity and revenue if even one of your servers went down. This article looks at the importance of backup for MS Exchange.

Microsoft Exchange is one of the most used ‘filing cabinets’ in today’s office, where meetings are scheduled, documents are shared and business is conducted. For most organisations, this makes the Microsoft Exchange server mission critical – imagine how much you would lose in productivity and revenue if even one of your servers went down.  Also, that same ‘filing cabinet’ has to be fully accessible for legal reasons because quite often organisations are required to retain auditing information – including email.

Microsoft Exchange administrators need to know how they can protect Exchange data and recover it quickly with the least amount of impact on operations. There are several automated recovery and restoration solutions on the market that compete for an administrators’ attention, so understanding the difference between product offerings is critical to determining which solution will work best for your business.  

Microsoft Exchange comes with its own recovery solutions, but even a highly experienced administrator rushing through page after page of instructions will take hours – sometimes even days – to complete a recovery, creating an unacceptable business risk. Not only are resident Exchange backup solutions time-consuming, but it’s also impossible to tailor them or segment the backup process to make it a faster, less daunting task.   

Third-party backup and recovery solutions specifically designed for Exchange can deliver a range of benefits including reduced strain on IT personnel, the ability for inexperienced staff to perform the restore, reduced downtime, flexible backup options and significant overall cost saving. More importantly, it gives confidence that, in the event of a catastrophe, a full restore is at their fingertips.

Reduce the cost of personnel

A well-designed backup and recovery solution should be simple and agile enough to empower even an inexperienced person to take over in an emergency and successfully restore a server to the point of failure. All backup and recovery products make a point of highlighting their advanced user interfaces, but whether an interface is advanced or not really depends on the perspective of the administrator who has to step in when a crisis looms!  

Inexperienced administrators present a potential weak link in any organisation’s backup and recovery plans, as they struggle to exercise their memory of the steps required to recover while the help desk phone is ringing off the hook. Most Exchange backup and recovery products fail to account for this, so keep an eye out for solutions that walk you through the recovery process step by step. Ultimately, this will reduce the cost of personnel, server downtime and the impact on infrastructure. In addition, when the recovery process is simplified, the Exchange server will demand less regular attention from staff – they can concentrate on proactive projects and spend less time doing repetitive backup checks.

Recover from a disaster in minutes

So how easy can it be to find yourself in a disaster scenario? The answer is very easy.  Imagine this - as you go home early in the evening from your office , you notice some contractors installing a new piece of air conditioning equipment on the roof of the building. Two hours later, you get a frantic call from the VP of sales saying that email is down as the result of a power shutoff that was not cleared through IT. All of the sudden, the Asia Pacific regional office can’t transmit end-of-quarter sales reports needed to create a quarterly earnings report.

Whether it is the kind of externally caused shutdown of a service or an all-too-frequent internal user error, a prolonged disruption can stop an organisation in its tracks.  Regardless of the cause of the disruption, the only thing anybody cares about is the answer to this question: “How fast can I recover?”

Speed of recovery is the number one concern for any IT administrator, but the utilities found in Microsoft Exchange itself will not allow them to recover quickly from failure.   The goal is to obtain a tool that not only backs up data stores as efficiently and compactly as possible, but also makes it easy to recover them quickly.   

There are two kinds of techniques for Exchange protection – brick-level and database-level backups. Brick-level backups are slow but necessary for recovering individual messages. Database-level backups protect of the entire Exchange information store, but are unable to restore individual messages or mailboxes.   

Completing a brick-level backup is a time consuming and frustrating process, but it is a necessary exercise to achieve the granularity required to restore individual messages, mail boxes or folders, which are often essential to the operation of a business. In the Exchange email world, granularity refers to the level of details contained in an organisation’s backup and is key when you are trying to recover individual messages in a hurry. On average, this can take 20-30 times longer than a simple database backup to complete – hours, even days, for larger organisations.   

Some organisations try to cut the backup window size down by limiting the granularity of their backup, but this can backfire if a recovery requires more detail than the backup captures – particularly if you need to refer back to a specific email for legal reasons.  

Ideally you want an approach that achieves granularity within an organisation’s recovery time objective; the two are not mutually exclusive. This is found in applications that deliver the speed of a database-level backup with the granularity of the brick-level backup using disk imaging technology.

Reduce data storage costs

Any backup solution can create a full backup, but few offer the technology or flexibility to save significant disk space and cost. Given that IT administrators also have to contend with the high cost of network data storage, I believe they should look closely at vendors that use compression technology to shrink backup stores with an eye toward reducing the amount of top-tier storage disks required for mission-critical applications like Exchange.   

It is possible to compress files by up to 56 per cent of their original size and compression pays major dividends in recoveries because it speeds access to Exchange mail boxes and messages. By effectively halving their backup requirements, organisations can speed up the overall backup process, reduce the impact the backup regime has on server performance system resources and be backed up and running quickly.  

Administrators should also look for a solution that gives them the freedom to choose compression levels and balance the need for rapid backups with the need to limit the amount of disk resources that are committed to Exchange. This is critical because the infrastructure costs of enterprise-class storage already rank as the single biggest expense within an IT environment.

Prioritise speed of backup

In disaster recovery, there is one constant: the faster a system is restored to a known, good working condition, the sooner users will be productive. However, meeting your recovery time objective also requires that database administrator take a holistic view of the Exchange environment. The administrator needs to balance application recovery with business continuity; one size does not fit all. Having the ability to throttle the recovery settings allows the administrator to balance the bandwidth provided to business-critical applications, even if it means one application might be slowed at the expense of a higher priority task.

Historically, organisations have become resigned to complicated backup and recovery routines. However, disk imaging technology means that backing up and restoring mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange need not be complex or slow. With the right tools in place, in conjunction with a tested disaster recovery plan, Exchange administrators can recover their databases virtually to the point of failure in minutes, not hours or days.