What will data loss cost you?

Without warning your Exchange system goes down and business screeches to a halt.

The only thing that appears to be working is your phone, and it's ringing off the hook with angry demands for answers and a resolution right now!  As the Exchange Administrator, you have to take immediate action to make things right, because when Exchange is down, employees can't work, salespeople can't take orders, reputations and compliance issues are at risk and customers can't do business with your company.

You thought your organization was protected from unplanned downtime and data loss by implementing clustering and replication, so what happened?

One or more of the Exchange databases failed. The failure event could have been triggered by several issues, such as neglecting to implement disaster prevention and optimization maintenance processes, hardware failure or interaction from an individual or 3rd party product or process.

Regardless of the reason for failure, clustering and replication technologies are useless if an Exchange database fails.

Clustering:   Clustering relies upon two or more servers to share a common data storage device, such as a Storage Area Network (SAN) or external drive array. While clustering offers high-availability from a hardware standpoint, it offers no protection from a database failure or corruption.

Replication:   To protect against physical failures in the primary disk and data subsystems, a file driver replicates all data changes as they occur to a local and/or remote standby server. The fatal flaw in this approach is that all transactions, the bad along with the good, will be replicated to the failover server, corrupting it as well.

As the Exchange Administrator, your reputation and job are on the line.

Good thing you planned ahead and protected your organization by completing traditional nightly tape backups and storing them offsite for disasters like this. Or is it?

You're about to learn some very hard lessons!