Exchange Backup and Recovery
Replay for Exchange 2007

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.

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IP Telephony
3CX Phone System

Our company used to have an office located in an executive suite, and the landlord owned the PBX system. We’ve grown over the years, and in July 2007 we moved into a location with more office space. With the move we also needed to purchase and install our own phone system. We began looking at our options, and wanted to go with a Windows-based PBX.

We originally considered going with the open source Asterisk and Asterisk based appliances, but also packaged Windows-based PBXs. I liked the Asterisk solution, but given that we’re a Windows-based shop we had plenty of old servers around loaded with Window Server 2003. After seeing an advertisement for the 3CX Phone System in Windows IT Pro we decided to give it a try. Based on my research the other Windows based PBXs cost more money and weren’t as accessible from a trial standpoint.

We have a 30 extension VoIP phone system for our office, and the 3CX software was easy to download, install and run. I had it downloaded and running a two extension system in about an hour in a test environment. Deployment to production wasn’t bad, as 3CX provides configuration templates for most popular phones and PSTN gateways. What cost the most time was (like most deployments) the planning and configuration of the dial plan and extensions.

One of my favorite features of 3CX is the simple web-based administration console. I also like that 3CX can use our Exchange server for voicemail, which emails our voicemails to our email inboxes. Ease of installation was another nice feature, as I performed the entire implementation without ever talking to their customer service. We did start with the free version, which 3CX supports via their online forum. It sometimes took a 12 hours period to get a question answered, but there are some pretty dedicated and technical people around the world that know this product well and help.

As for things I would like to improve about 3CX, I do wish there was a dial by name feature. I managed to create one by recording the same information and configuring the auto-attendant, but a dial by name that uses a directory or the user info contained in the extensions would be cool. We also struggled a bit until we found a good PSTN gateway, but we’ve been happy a gateway from Patton Electronics that we found. It may be more expensive than other PSTN gateways, but it’s worth it. We also had to manually code the configuration files for our Cisco IP phones, but there was lots of good information available on the Web to do this.

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