Microsoft Exchange Server

Deduplication Storage for Backup and Recovery

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The Challenge with Protecting Exchange Data

Enterprises depend heavily on Microsoft Exchange to facilitate vital communications such as e-mail, scheduling, and calendaring. Backing up and recovering Exchange data is a critical element in basic IT planning. This is especially hard with tape backups and restores, which increase delays in restores and decrease reliability for data integrity. If Exchange data is lost, it can represent a loss of critical customer and supplier relationship data, therefore, putting business operations at risk.

Additional challenges include:

• Cost of Retaining Exchange Backup Data for Optimal Recovery: Microsoft’s preferred policy for backup of Exchange 2003 is daily full backups. While it does take longer, it makes recovery straightforward and simple. The big problem with this policy is that it creates a lot of backup data to manage, especially for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, if this mail store needs to be kept for years.

  If that data is stored on conventional disk storage, it is generally too expensive to keep for long periods of time, so it ends up on tape within a few days. Recovering from tape, storing tape, and handling tape is bad enough for backup, but in recovery, it often leads to data loss.

• For disaster protection, sufficient copies of the Exchange Information Store need to be in a separate location to survive a system or site problem.

The Data Domain Solution

• Data Domain Deduplication Storage systems
• Data Domain Replicator software option
• Daily full backups using any leading backup software

Data Domain’s Global Compression eliminates redundancy in Exchange backup images, so it is very cost-effective to retain months of backups in a system. Many Data Domain customers back up Exchange data to Data Domain systems and typically see 20x–25x compression ratios over time. By maximizing retention on disk, the benefits of disk for reliable recoveries can be realized.

Exchange integration is now a standard part of leading backup software and Data Domain fully supports these, including those from Atempo, BakBone, CommVault, EMC/Legato, HP, IBM/Tivoli, and Symantec/VERITAS.

The Benefit

• Simple, Fast Exchange Protection: After a full backup, the Exchange Information Store is complete and synchronized with all log information. It is ready for recovery as long as it is kept safe. Data Domain’s Data Invulnerability Architecture safeguards the backup data from data integrity issues by verifying the data is complete and restorable at time of backup.
• Exchange Information Store Backup/Recovery: The most straightforward and recommended way to backup Exchange data is full backups of the Exchange Information Store databases. This causes logs to be reduced and synchronized as well, reducing capacity on the primary store where it is needed most. With Data Domain’s deduplication technology providing 10-30x average data reduction, the resulting capacity used is very small, making retention of many weeks of full backups extraordinarily cost-effective.
• .pst File Backup/Recovery: Often messages are migrated into .pst files on different systems. This separates what might be valuable corporate information from the Exchange Information Store. A big challenge is that desktops with these files are not backed up with regularity, because of the fear that it is simply too much data to store. With Data Domain’s deduplication technology, backing up these files repetitively has only a marginal extra cost, and it is recommended that they be included in the backup policy.
• Disaster Recovery Protection with WAN Vaulting: Leveraging Data Domain’s deduplication, Data Domain Replicator software enables highly efficient network vaulting of Exchange backup data, using a tiny fraction of the bandwidth compared to traditional replication.