Exchange Backup and
Recovery
Replay for Exchange 2007
| Reader: |
Ryan Dorman
Senior Network
Engineer |
| Product: |
| Replay for
Exchange 2007 |
| Company: |
| Appassure |
| Contact: |
| www.appassure.com |
At my company, we were having difficulty
performing small restores
of Exchange backups, and had a
lack of confidence in the actual integrity of
our archived data. We also wanted to restore
the entire Exchange architecture in a shorter
period of time than we could with our current
solution, so improving our Exchange
backup procedures was something we were
very interested in.
I began doing some research online by
looking at reviews and product information
to find a new Exchange backup and
disaster recovery solution that would fit our needs. We considered
products from companies both large and small, including Dell, EMC,
Network Appliances, and Sonasoft. After our research, we decided on
Appassure’ Replay for Exchange 2007. We went with Appassure for
a number of reasons, including its impressive method of restoration
and integrity checking, the fact that the system was storage agnostic
and didn’t lock us into one vendor, and the price was significantly
less than some of the other vendors. The fact that the product was
cluster-aware was also a huge plus.
We decided on using Replay for Exchange 2007 on two Exchange
2003 clusters. The installation of the Replay product was
quite easy, requiring only a commodity server and enough
storage to house the backups and a lightweight agent on the Exchange server.
A single reboot
of each backend
Exchange node
was also required.
The base image
process, which creates
a baseline for
all future change
deltas to be based
on, was the longest
part of the installation.
Replay for Exchange has completely simplified our Exchange
backup and disaster recovery strategy. We can now recover user data
from Exchange down to the individual items in half hour increments
without taking Exchange offline or going through the process of setting
up a Recovery Storage group.
Our Exchange system gets a heavy amount of use, so due to this
heavy load on our infrastructure the rate of change to our Exchange
database was higher than what Appassure had seen in previous
installations. There were initial problems with snapshots due to this
high rate of change, but we worked with Appassure support to make
changes to our installation (such as increased memory on the Replay
server and moving to 64-bit Windows 2003) and to their code that has
made the product work in our environment.
Continued on page 2
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