Networker

Re: [Networker] Backing up a large Exchange 2007 server

2008-10-01 11:16:18
Subject: Re: [Networker] Backing up a large Exchange 2007 server
From: Bruce Breidall <Bruce.Breidall AT CONCUR DOT COM>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 08:13:04 -0700
This answer is almost always dictated by your legal department. I
currently am not responsible for exchange backups, but in a previous
life it was decided (per legal) that no DR copies were to be taken for
exchange, and that the retention was 7 days.

There was no archiving done at all. We used the exchange client, and the
backups and restores were completely owned and managed by the exchange
group (similar to SQL or RMAN).

My only responsibility was to design a storage configuration that would
support the number of users they projected a server could handle, and
then duplicate that configuration on each cluster, and to ensure the
backup/restore infrastructure was always available.

You should not be the person to dictate those policies, nor do you want
to be that person. Let the legal department and upper management figure
that out.

Just one example of many possible outcomes.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Stan Horwitz
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 6:42 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Backing up a large Exchange 2007 server

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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