IBM DS8000, DS6000 manual Cost of Downtime, Target Environment

Cost of Downtime

When a critical system like an Exchange server goes down, data, productivity, and money may be lost. For a typical business that has 500 active users on an Exchange server, if access to that server is lost for two hours the company may experience a productivity loss of as much as 1000 employee hours, which can equate to tens of thousands of dollars. That does not consider other losses, such as missed communications from partners, damaged customer relations, or simply lost deals.

Target Environment

The IBM System Storage™ DS6000 and DS8000 series storage arrays target medium to large-size businesses seeking enterprise level reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS), combined with support of advanced copy features such as FlashCopy®, and Metro/Global Mirror®. In a large environment, it is not uncommon to have multiple DS6000 and DS8000 arrays deployed in a complimentary fashion. The DS8000 series is designed to scale to the needs or the largest enterprise data centers.

Customers deploying these arrays for Exchange-based solutions will typically have installations that range from several servers hosting a thousand or more users on a DS6000 at a single site, to fully-loaded DS8000 multi-node arrays hosting tens of thousands of users. Usually, the latter types of deployments include geographically dispersed clusters with multi-site data replication enabled.

The current version of Backup Exec 11d for Microsoft Exchange does not include instant recovery capabilities, however future releases may support this functionality.

During lab testing the average recovery time for a single Storage Group with a 50GB database was ~ 20 minutes (vs. ~ 5 minutes for instant recovery). While faster than tape-based recovery methods, these restore times should be considered against RTOs and service level agreements (SLAs) if applicable.

In many cases, production recovery requests are for individual mailboxes, rather than entire databases or storage groups. With the introduction of Backup Exec Granular Recovery Technology, Symantec enables faster RTOs for mailbox or item level restores, which can be restored from VSS backups.

Exchange 2003 VSS Backup Solution	Page 6	David West, David Hartman
For IBM Storage DS8000/DS6000		©Copyright IBM Corp. 2007
And Symantec Backup Exec 11d