Suppliers fall over themselves to support Exchange 2010
New species spreads to four new environments
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
Microsoft has shot Exchange Server 2010 worldwide spurring storage suppliers to instantly announce their support for the application.
Exchange 2010 offers new features such as e-mail archiving, to help prevent inbox overload, while gaining admin improvements and more flexible deployment options. It has much improved I/O, partly due to support for 64-bit Windows and subsequent enablement of more memory. Microsoft says this means Exchange 2010 can be run with slower and higher-capacity SATA disk drives instead of expensive fast Fibre Channel drives.
Users can also archive personal messages within the Exchange database, instead of shipping them out to a third-party archive external to Exchange.
Exchange high-availability has been simplified with Data Availability Groups (DAG). With this function, mailbox and database failover can be carried out instead of a server failover. There is also more unified failover management and less need to know about the nuts and bolts of Microsoft clustering.
Exchange eco-system swings into gear
Email archiving supplier Mimosa has added Exchange 2010 support, with its NearPoint product delivering this from the end of November. It says customers can use NearPoint for Exchange 2010 to establish an organisational archive that complements Exchange 2010's personal archive functionality.
NetApp says its SnapManager for Exchange Server can help reduce storage footprint by minimising the number of Exchange data copies that enterprise customers need to deploy.
SnapManager for Exchange Server has integrated single mailbox recovery capabilities, to enable sysadmins to offload routine e-mail restore operations to help-desk personnel. It is integrated with Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) technology to provide backup and restore support for the Exchange Server 2010 DAG function.
Neverfail, which replicates data in real-time to standby secondary and optional tertiary servers, and provides automatic or manually controlled switchover, has also added support for Exchange 2010. It says it has extended its product to provide continuous Exchange 2010 availability, and asserts it is the only integrated product that can keep Exchange users working when related software applications - such as ones based on SQL, SharePoint, Mobile and file content - go down.
Symantec has updated its backup and archiving products to add Exchange 2010 support. The Enterprise Vault v8.0 archive adds direct drag-and-drop access to the archive from Outlook, so users no longer have to rely on “shortcut” links from their mailbox. It is available for previous versions of Exchange and is scheduled to be available for Exchange 2010 early next year.
Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 provides Exchange 2010 backup and restore and is available now.
Symantec will deliver updated versions of NetBackup, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault over the next few months to reduce storage by deduplicating information stored in Exchange 2010, as well as other applications such as SharePoint and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 and the next versions of NetBackup and Backup Exec are also scheduled to provide granular recovery of Exchange 2010 email messages, files, mailboxes, and public and private folders from single-pass database backups. ®
COMMENTS
On paper looks like good Exchange release, but still problems with Windows Server
I dont understood - isn't the backup built into Windows 2008R2 + Exchange 2010 already? The Exchange 2010 backup related article says nothing about that but I read somewhere that Exchange 2010 can be backed up right from Windows 2008 R2 backup tool. Seems like the only built-in solution without costly third-parties software, as a Microsoft Data Protection server 2007 is trully "bloated" product for backup purposes. It creates so many dynamic disk partitions that they all crash after single disconnection of the iSCSI drive with that many complex partitions. DPM needs the same redesign as Exchange, because now SATA disks can be used for Exchange 2010 but fibre-channel disks are needed for backup if DPM 2007 is used for that.
Also BEWARE - Windows disk mirroring does not work even on Windows 2008 R2. If you mirror a system drive (C) of your Exchange 2010 server, then if power cut happens and one OS boot disk fails to start when power is restored, server WILL NOT START AT ALL from other non-damaged disk in mirrored disk pair. And Microsoft explained that non working mirror IS A FEATURE BY DESIGN. This is a terrible bug, its a SCANDAL that requires a separate Register article so every user must know. that they are not protected. I wonder how many users know that if they make disk mirror for their C: disk and one disk will crash, the OS (and the Exchange server or whatever business critical application on that server) will not boot-up from the other disk without half-day long lab type bit tweaking exercise where you must not make any error in long list of manual recovery steps (involving manual creating of additional boot partitions, etc.). On all UNIX'es I tried with OS based system disk mirror, if one disk crashes in the mirror set during power failure, system boots up from the other disk properly (unattended, fully automatically - that is why mirrror is needed for OS drive), so I can later insert new disk instead of failed one, break old mirror with non-existing disk, and create new mirror on the new disk.
So I can agree with "lol" that there are things that are hard to believe they are still NOT working, at least in as modern OS as is Windows 2008 R2. Not even reached up to Exchange for reliability test - I was stopped at so basic thing that the mirror for Windows OS boot drive simply still does not work. If even this is not working, probably I still need to wait for Windows 2013, Exchange 2013 and then test realiability again.
If you rely on Windows Server in your business, and have C: disk mirrored in OS, try this:
1. Power off server.
2. Take out first system disk. Leave second disk in place.
3. Start the server.
You think this situation must be handled by a C: disk mirror? Test that yourself. Server wil NOT start, and this is "by design"! Is this "most realiable Windows server ever released"?
Re: Are you kidding?
@Shane Menshik
> Forget all that downtime / money lost paying someone to constantly maintain and update that Microsoft junk
I think you'll find that most IT professionals that run a tight ship have had higher uptime over the last couple of years with Exchange 2007 than they would have with Google Apps.
Saying nothing about the proven additional productivity enjoyed by users of the Office/Exchange platform offers over any other solution.
Are you kidding?
Seriously - who cares - go to zimbra or move to google apps.. Forget that horrible piece of software. SMB's is where exchange was making some bucks forever but now there is 0 reason for most SMB's even to own their own server.. Forget all that downtime / money lost paying someone to constantly maintain and update that Microsoft junk, - outsource it to a hosted provider and save your company some bucks and headaches.. Get rid of your IT GUY and outsource that too.
Exchange / outlook / Microsoft $$ licenses = soooo old school.. time to get with the times and get a new game plan people!
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