|
Companies today are facing the ever-increasing challenge of managing the explosive growth of valuable data. As the predominant form of communication for business transactions, email is an application that is mission critical to organizations of all sizes. It generates a huge amount of information that must be immediately available and protected. The loss of a single message may generate hours of unnecessary and frustrating labor for administrators and can lower productivity or even hinder progress within organizations.
Email applications have become key communication tools for businesses of all sizes. Today, email is the most common and vital form of communication, often replacing the phone as the preferred mechanism for exchanging information in the business world. It is a more efficient and cost-effective way of disseminating information of all types (text, image, video, and even voice) to fellow employees and between companies located anywhere in the world. In fact, as companies consider their messaging servers to be mission critical, these are among the first servers to be recovered after a disaster, sometimes even before phone systems.
Various recent reports indicate that:
- 75 percent of a typical company's intellectual property is contained in email
- 79 percent of companies accept email as written confirmation of transactions
- 75 percent of Fortune 500 litigation involves discovery of email communications
While businesses need email data to be protected and available, the amount of such data is growing exponentially. IT is faced with the challenge of backing up this critical Microsoft Exchange data within the existing backup window and recovering it quickly.
The objective of traditional backups is to minimize downtime for the enterprise messaging environment while providing the quickest possible data recovery in the event of a system crash, database corruption, loss of a single mailbox, or other forms of data loss. In order to maintain the availability of Exchange and protect its mission-critical data stores, companies go to great lengths to protect their Exchange environments. Today, this protection is primarily accomplished through online backups of the Exchange databases. If organizations also need to recover individual email messages or mailboxes, separate slow, error-prone, "brick-level" mailbox backups are typically required to recover these individual items without restoring the entire Exchange database.
With its latest release, Symantec? Backup Exec 11d for Windows Servers redefines traditional Exchange protection, eliminating daily Exchange backup windows with continuous data protection. And whether protecting Exchange continuously or not, Backup Exec 11d also eliminates slow, arduous mailbox backups, while still enabling the recovery of individual emails, folders, and mailboxes.
Traditional backups are not enough
Current administrators have two basic ways to back up Exchange Server data?at the database and at the mailbox level.
Database or mailbox protection or both?
Database backup is mandatory, as restoring a database is the only way to retrieve all of the Exchange Server data when a disaster occurs. Almost all backup applications protect Exchange databases in a similar fashion using the Microsoft provided Exchange backup application programming interfaces (APIs).
Individual "brick-level" or mailbox backups have often been considered "optional," but they are highly advantageous when a fast recovery is needed of specific mailbox or public folder data. Protecting the Exchange Server at the mailbox or message level enables the user to restore Exchange data at a granular level (for example, a single message, calendar item, or note). Mailbox backups are usually performed to restore message data for regulatory, legal, or emergency situations, such as a corporate audit, subpoena, or deletion of critical files. Although they can be a very fast and convenient way to restore data, they incur a higher cost than database backups for the following reasons:
- Twice the backups: They require administrators to run two separate backups of essentially the same information. One backup is of the individual mailboxes, and the other is for the Exchange mailbox stores. This leads to the second major drawback.
- Twice the time?or more: Individual mailbox backups are not easy or fast. While Exchange Server provides backup vendors with high-performance APIs to protect the database, this is not the case with traditional individual mailbox backups. Backup application vendors have had to rely on an older, slower technology (Microsoft Messaging application programming interface, known as MAPI) that was not designed for backup purposes to perform individual mailbox-level backups.
|
