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| MailShadow 2.0 - A Disaster Recovery Solution MailShadow 2.0 will enable Microsoft Exchange administrators to restore full email service to all Outlook users, or any set of critical users, within 10 minutes of any system outage or general disaster. Ongoing efforts to centralize Exchange and manage more email and people on fewer servers create a new Exchange administration model with greater vulnerability in the case of disaster. As such, demand for the right disaster recovery (DR) system is acute. Microsoft Exchange is a transaction-based application, so MailShadow 2.0 uses a transaction-based replication scheme. MailShadow communicates directly with Exchange to check the integrity of all data prior to forwarding transactions to the recovery server. By contrast, traditional file and block-level solutions simply replicate data corruption to failover Exchange information stores. MailShadow lets organizations move toward a universal disaster recovery program in affordable stages. Organizations may license MailShadow on a per-mailbox basis and select only a subset of critical mailboxes on an Exchange server to replicate. In this manner, organizations can immediately gain value at any comfortable investment threshold with the flexibility to expand as needed. How DR Done Right Works A Meta Group study found that 16 percent of primary Exchange server failures are due to database corruption. Disaster recovery can take hours to days if the Exchange information store on the failover server proves to be corrupt. Because MailShadow 2.0 doesn't employ methods that propagate corrupted data; MailShadow 2.0 can ensure that the failover Exchange server remains operational even if the failure cause of the original Exchange server was database corruption. By preventing the propagation of bad data, MailShadow 2.0 will be able to deliver a reliable RTO that others cannot -- an RTO of 10 minutes or less! MailShadow acquires from Exchange all transactions and transmits them to the corresponding user mailbox on a recovery failover Exchange server, ideally located remotely. Each of these transactions then is processed on the failover Exchange server just as on the primary server, with MailShadow working to ensure in real time that each replicated mailbox is fully synchronized with its equivalent on the primary server. MailShadow also validates that each transaction is complete and fully formed before transferring it. MailShadow queues all transactions and delivers them to the primary Exchange server when it is restored. The Economy of DR Done Right Cemaphore's MailShadow 2.0 is optimized for WAN performance. MailShadow efficiently transmits transactions only once, whereas traditional file and block-level replication solutions transmit the same data multiple times, each time using more bandwidth. MailShadow's proprietary transport protocol uses buffering, packet re-combination and compression to ensure high throughput even over high-latency lines. The resulting savings in WAN bandwidth alone, repeated month over month, may mean that MailShadow will more than pay for itself from savings realized. In booths 409 and 411 at the Microsoft Exchange Developers Conference this week in San Diego, Cemaphore will demonstrate MailShadow 2.0 replicating transactions from the primary Exchange server to a failover Exchange server, and delivering a differential restore after the primary Exchange server is restored after a failure. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Networking News :: home page |