Mark Garlick
Guest
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 Posted:
Tue Oct 05, 2004 5:38 pm Post subject:
Primary Site with disaster recovery site. |
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We have a new primary physical site, and a new secondary physical site which
will be used for disaster recovery only, both sites will be connected
together via corporate VPN using 2Mb ADSL connections.
Each site contains 3 servers (1 earmarked for exchange) and are with the
same domain and all are contained within a new 2000 Active Directory forest.
The biggest question I have is whether we can configure the exchange system
using 5.5 for which we are licensed and have knowledge of, or whether it
would be better to upgrade to exch 2000 or 2003. I also need to develop a
process so that if the primary server or site is unavailable there is a
method to restore or migrate users to the secondary site. We have Arcserve
and agents at each site.
Any ideas or pointers are greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Mark G.
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Al Mulnick
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Oct 06, 2004 4:51 am Post subject:
Re: Primary Site with disaster recovery site. |
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Couple of thoughts you may want to consider:
1) if disaster recovery is important, I highly suggest a third party
consultant with direct experience and a project scope that says you'll get a
tested DR plan when complete
2) I suggest that you read the disaster recovery paper for Exchange
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/library
3) I highly suggest that you use Exchange 2003. RSG's and the dial-tone
concepts might be of interest to you.
4) The key to this is to figure out what disaster recovery really means to
you and your company. To some it's just a smoking hole scenario. To others
it's anything that means that business transactions cannot take place.
Still others end up in the middle somewhere. Everyone figures out that not
all employees are created equal when it comes to DR. I highly suggest you
figure out the priority of restoration of service and the priority of people
it should it be restored to. That makes a huge difference in planning for
such things.
5) if it turns out that you need immediate recovery of data and service for
all users at the same time, you'll want to beef up that network link and
have a look at some hardware type solutions. There's a few out there that
would be worth looking at, but without knowing the rest of your requirements
and infrastructure it would be foolish to hazard a guess.
6) include testing in your process. The best laid plans have fallen apart
when implemented because they were untested. Don't be a statistic. <g>
There's plenty more, but that should get you started.
Al
"Mark Garlick" <Mark_Garlick(at)hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e$Gi5gtqEHA.4008@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
| Quote: | We have a new primary physical site, and a new secondary physical site
which will be used for disaster recovery only, both sites will be
connected together via corporate VPN using 2Mb ADSL connections.
Each site contains 3 servers (1 earmarked for exchange) and are with the
same domain and all are contained within a new 2000 Active Directory
forest.
The biggest question I have is whether we can configure the exchange
system using 5.5 for which we are licensed and have knowledge of, or
whether it would be better to upgrade to exch 2000 or 2003. I also need to
develop a process so that if the primary server or site is unavailable
there is a method to restore or migrate users to the secondary site. We
have Arcserve and agents at each site.
Any ideas or pointers are greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Mark G.
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