Hi All

I'm working on a backup design for Exchange 2013.  Unfortunately I
pretty much have to take what I've been given and make it work.

There are two sites and  there will be two DAGs with two replicas in
each DAG and 10x1TB databases per DAG.

Since there are only two replicas the backup will be throttled by the
integrity checker. Drives are TS1120 at one site and TS1140 at the
other, and I've been directed to take a full backup every weekend.  I
wanted to stagger them through the week but was overruled on that.  Of
course disk space is tight, but I will need to use a file pool because I
can't have all my drives busy with Exchange to the exclusion of all else
as the data drips through the integrity checker.

I was wondering if client compression might be useful here.  The
databases will normally be all active at one site and all passive at the
other for each DAG, so if I'm backing up the passive copy the additional
CPU usage should not be a problem. With the exchange delayed deletion
features, redundant database copies, modern disk arrays etc I don't
anticipate these backups will ever be restored for anything other than
audit or discovery purposes, and so impact of compression on restore
won't be an issue.

Is anyone using client compression on Exchange (2007 or later)  and if
so what sort of compression rate and cpu impact are you seeing? Is there
any impact on throughput?

Thanks

Steve

Steven Harris
TSM Admin
Canberra Australia.