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Best Practice #8: Considering offsite storage and remote recovery

Richard Luckett
One of the hardest lessons to learn is that no single location is immune from disasters. A disaster doesn't have to be terrorist attack or a hurricane. It can be a failed air conditioner in a datacenter that causes the room temperature to rise and the servers to shut down. It can be a broken water pipe that floods the basement where the servers are located. And let's not forget the disasters we create ourselves through human error.

When you discuss lessons learned from any type of disaster, one theme that is consistent is how having -- or not having -- offsite storage and a remote recovery site affects an organization's ability to cope.

These disaster recovery solutions range in complexity and cost. They can start with something as simple as a service that picks up and stores your backup tapes in a secure offsite facility to a dedicated datacenter that stores a fully replicated copy of all business critical applications, which can go live with the flip of a switch.

Unfortunately, the technology required to replicate Exchange mailbox stores does not come with Exchange out of the box. There are, however, a number of third-party vendors that allow you to replicate mailbox stores to recovery sites. Neverfail, NSI, and XoSoft have products designed specifically for Exchange. For more options, take a look at this

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list of high availability vendors on Bitpipe.com.


Best Practices Checklist: Exchange Server disaster recovery planning

 Home: Introduction
 Best Practice #1: Understanding Exchange databases
 Best Practice #2: Building your plan around the technology at hand
 Best Practice #3: Keeping e-mail in perspective
 Best Practice #4: Configuring server hardware for disaster recovery
 Best Practice #5: Configuring Exchange for disaster recovery
 Best Practice #6: Simulating a disaster
 Best Practice #7: Learning from others' mistakes and successes
 Best Practice #8: Considering offsite storage and remote recovery
 Best Practice #9: Familiarizing yourself with the right resources

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:   
Richard Luckett, Vice President and Senior Consultant, Ajettix Security
Richard Luckett is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer on the Windows NT 4.0, 2000 and 2003 platforms and has been certified on Exchange since version 4.0. He is the co-author of Administering Exchange 2000 Server, published by McGraw Hill, and has written four Exchange courses, Introduction to Exchange 2000, and Hands-on Exchange 2003, Ultimate Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 Administrator Boot Camp for Global Knowledge Inc. Richard is currently Vice President and Senior Consultant for Ajettix Security, where he is the head of the Microsoft security practice.

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