Greetings everyone;

We're in the design stage of deploying a new Microsoft Exchange 2007 server
which will be clustered with several nodes. We expect that within a year
after initial deployment, we'll have roughly 11,000 Exchange users and 20TB
worth of Exchange data. All the data will probably sit on an EMC Clariion,
although that is yet to be decided for sure.

We will have a backup window of 12 hours for this Exchange server. We have a
Sony PetaSite tape library with 14 Sony S-AIT1 drives, but we do not want to
invest any money in that library due to the impending EOL of the Sony tape
media. Our backup server is Power Edition NetWorker 7.4.1 (which I will
upgrade to 7.4.3 at some point) running on Solaris 10 sparc. We also have a
Power Edition NetWorker 7.4.2 server running on a Linux box with a Qualstar
tape library with 4 LTO-3 tape drives that is underutilized, but it is in
the same room as the Exchange server will be, so we are not keen on using it
to back up the Exchange 2007 data unless maybe if we hand carry LTO-3 tapes
to the building where our main backup server is located, just for safe
keeping.

If we lose the Exchange server, our objective is to bring it back online
within a few hours so people can continue to send/receive email, then
recover their old email within the next week.

It seems to me that we must include some sort of archiving solution in this
system to avoid backing up the 80% or so of email that never changes and
rarely gets read to tape. I think we should do a daily back up to disk for
and then go to tape maybe once a month for the full set of data. I figure
that backing up 20TB to tape on a daily basis (or even weekly) is an
unrealistic goal over a Gige network, which is what we have in place. We
could go over fibre to our Sony tape library, but I hate the idea of
investing money to do that when I expect to phase it out in a couple of
years.

I am wondering what other sites with large Exchange servers do for archiving
and backups and what your requirements are for your backup window and
recovery time objective.

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