Ummm... Rebooting expectations perhaps? :-) Has anyone tried restoring that DB anywhere? It's not going to happen in 45 minutes...
Without much more detail it's tough to make solid recommendations, but a few things that would be on my list... 1. Recommend mailbox management to get the store size down. Make the point that the larger the store, the longer it takes and the more it will cost for HA. They may not be willing, but at least it sets the bar for complexity/cost. 2. Define DR for them. Dial-tone Exchange (inbound/outbound mail, nothing old in the mailboxes for a while) or full recovery. You could probably have a dial-tone system up in an hour or so. Also determine if they want full email fast recovery for all users or just a subset. 3. Some form of clustering/cluster rep. Numerous options available. 4. BES HA is somewhat easier. Check their latest docs, but the last time I worked with a BES the solution was an off-box DB that the BES could point to. Have a second BES (maybe a VM) ready to spin up if one fails. They may have a more elegant solution by now. But if that DB goes down, SQL recovery has to be in place. 5. Make the point that this will be expensive and require significant testing. 6. Migrate to hosted Exchange... :-) Good luck... *********************** Charlie Kaiser charl...@golden-eagle.org Kingman, AZ *********************** > -----Original Message----- > From: wjh [mailto:nt...@hedgedigger.com] > Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 6:38 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: mail server DR ? > > Hi all, > > So the VP of one of our clients wants to be able to guarantee > a 45 minute window of downtime if there is a critical failure > of their mail server. They are using exchange 2003 > enterprise in standalone on a HP DL360 with a StorageWorks > connected by scsi. The mdbdata folder is 450GB. This is for > less than 200 users. They currently have no retention policy > and no limit on mailbox sizes. They have 100 users with > blackberries on a BES 5.0 server. Very important that BBs > stay workable. > > Backup Exec does incremental to disk and fulls to tape(LTO4) > for offsite storage. They have a metro Ethernet connection > providing a 100 meg connection to the internet at a data center. > > What would you consider a reasonable solution for DR within > 45 minutes? > They supposedly had no money for projects/capital > expenditures remaining this year, but then he asked for this. > > Thanks for any thoughts/advice. > > Bill > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource > hog! ~ ~ > <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
