Over the past decade, corporate Email has slowly but surely moved from a Tier 2 application with an acceptable Recovery Time Objective of up to 48 hours, to a Mission Critical application that is always expected to be available. This is mainly due to the maturation of mobility-enabling technology such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile as well as many ‘paperless’ initiatives that rely on a company’s messaging infrastructure. Executives, managers, and everyday employees alike just expect Email to always be ‘On’.
Compuquip recognizes how crucial Email has become to our clients (and really, to ourselves) and has been designing and deploying solutions that meet this rigorous standard without breaking the bank. In fact, over half of our current and scheduled projects involve deploying a Highly Available infrastructure for Email. There are two technologies that are helping to make ‘Always On’ Email a reality:
- Virtualization
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
The benefits of Virtualization in general and VMware in particular have been widely documented for the past few years, including in these two blog posts: Uptime 201 and Cloud Computing and the Future. However, Exchange Server 2010, which was released to the public in November of 2009 and is still in the early adoption phase of its lifecycle, looks like a home run when it comes to High Availability for small businesses and enterprises alike. To note:
- Exchange 2010 improves upon the clustering enhancements introduced in Exchange 2007 by introducing Distributed Availability Group (DAG) technology. DAG eliminates the need for traditional shared storage clusters by replicating changes to the ‘Active’ Exchange database in a near real-time fashion. The changes are sent to one or many ‘Passive’ databases in the form of 1 MB Log files.
- As stated in the previous bullet, there is no longer a 1-to-1 limit for database replication. A single database can be replicated to up to 16 different Exchange 2010 Servers!
- As you may infer from the previous two bullets, clustering across the WAN, which was complex and limited in Exchange 2007, is fully supported with very few restrictions in 2010.
- A Failover from an Active copy of the data to a Passive copy of the data can be done on a per-database basis; failing over an entire Server which may be hosting multiple databases is no longer required.
- While Windows Enterprise licenses are still required to enable replication, Exchange Standard Edition can be used for DAG, representing a significant cost savings.
Large and small clients alike are now able to achieve ‘Always On’ email that is not only affordable, but can be implemented quickly. There are many more High Availability benefits which are driving our Clients’ adoption of Exchange 2010 and Virtualization, but you get the idea.
For a real world example, check out Exchange 2010 & Virtualization – ‘Always On’ Email Part II
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