Energizing Exchange

Exchange is about more than email these days -- it's a business-critical application for most organizations.

That means it has to be available, managed, and secured at all times. When there is a problem with Exchange, the entire company knows about it, so do many people who communicate with your company from the outside.

With Microsoft's Exchange 2007 set to be released to manufacturing next month, the application is likely to become a much larger concern for most organizations. So we've put together this tip sheet for optimizing and running Exchange more efficiently.

Buy Exchange expertise
Sports retailer Zumiez uses an appliance from service provider Azaleos to run and manage Exchange. Zumiez technology director Lee Hudson credits Azaleos with improving sluggish performance and helping migrate from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003. Zumiez uses Azaleos' BladeOne, an appliance that sits in the retailer's data center while Azaleos monitors Exchange's performance and replicates it to a remote DR site maintained by the service provider.

"They are our Exchange department," Hudson says. "We had struggled with Exchange because we didn't have a lot of expertise and time to keep it up and running. Exchange was slow, our users wanted to upgrade, and we were nervous about doing it."Hudson says the upgrade went fine, and Exchange is one less thing he and his small IT staff have to worry about.

Don't get too attached
MessageOne will add a service targeted specifically at Exchange attachments to its Email Management Services (EMS) offering next month. EMS uses single-instance storage, saving one attachment in the customer's Exchange store and sending other copies of that attachment to the MessageOne archive. EMS says that could slash Exchange data by up to 80 percent.

But Erica Driver, principal analyst at Forrester Research, warns that users should do some serious thinking before they go down the outsourcing route for archiving. "The decision point should be how quickly do I need to get the archive up and running, and do we have the internal IT resources," she explains.

In many cases, according to Driver, desperation will force firms into the arms of an outsourcer. "If you're a financial services company, and NASD comes to you and says that you're not archiving your emails and IMs, you're going to do it immediately through a hosted partner," she adds.

Set limits

Enforce strict quotas, and don't let your users talk you out of them - unless it's your boss or somebody with an exceptional reason for needing more capacity."People would all love to have Gmail-size [2 gigabytes per user] accounts, but disks are expensive and it slows the whole system down," Zumiez's Hudson says. "Start pushing a gig or 800-megs [per user] and it gets slow. If we raise the limits, users will hit the new limits. People need limits in their life."

Educate users
Capacity hogs aren't the only dangerous types of Exchange users.

CIOs and IT managers, need to foster a "loose lips sink ships" mentality among users if they want to keep sensitive data within their firms. "The first thing that you should do is create training to teach users their responsibilities," says Burton Group analyst Pete Lindstrom. "Email is so persistent and available that folks forget that notion of responsibility."

Lindstrom says many still perceive email as a short-lived form of communication, something which could not be farther from the truth. "You should assume that it will live forever," he says, adding that internal users should bear this in mind whenever they compose an email.

"If you're talking about legal issues, the users are the ones that will be pointed to as a 'smoking gun', particularly if they are spouting off and saying things that are inappropriate," warns the analyst.To Page Two:

Archive for compliance...
With an estimated 90 percent of U.S. companies involved in some form of litigation, the ability to quickly access archived emails is a high priority in corporate boardrooms. (See Jury's Out on Email Scrutiny and Email Review Can Reduce Risk.)

Email archiving has already proven crucial in at least one high-profile legal dispute, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) slamming Morgan Stanley with a $15 million fine when it was unable to produce email evidence in court. (See On the Brink of Storage Disaster and Storage Goes to Law School.)

Exchange forms a critical part of this equation, particularly when it comes to archiving data, according to Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Archiving used to be primarily for financial services firms, but now it really applies to just about everybody," he says, adding that a slew of regulations are forcing firms to concentrate on e-discovery, or how quickly they can access archived emails. (See Nat'l Guard Picks Savi and Regulators Rip Records Managers.)

...But spread the load

Osterman also warns firms not to focus all their compliance efforts on Exchange. Many brokerages, for example, send out millions of emails to their clients each morning which may bypass the Exchange server altogether. "If you have a really high volume of emails you may not necessarily want to send them through Exchange because it poses a huge load on the server," he says."What's important to consider is how and where you capture [these] emails. If it was generated by a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you would want to capture it at the network gateway."

CDP Exchange
But make sure it's a CDP application that's specifically built for Exchange, which isn't all that hard to find these days. Asempra Technologies, Mimosa Systems, and TimeSpring Software have CDP packages specifically for Exchange; Mendocino Software just rolled out an Exchange module for its CDP product.

Virtua Health VP of Technology Tom Pacek turned to Mimosa's NearPoint to make sure he could recover from any failed Exchange server in time to keep the 1,800 physicians and 7,200 employees on his SAN from noticing.

NearPoint keeps a copy of the Exchange database on its own server, and continuously updates the copies whenever there are changes. If the Exchange server goes down, admins can restore from any point in time. Text search features make it easer to find specific messages.

"We can recover in a split second without losing any email," Pacek says. "We can roll back to any point in time from the day we started the archive."UPS Exchange
The Teneros Application Continuity Appliance (ACA) acts as a sort of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for Exchange servers. (See SMBs Balk at Backup.)

The ACA sits between the Exchange Server and the network backbone, and replicates data to provide failover in case the server goes down. This keeps Exchange up and running. If there was a delay in your last backup, ACA can failback to data replicated since the last backup so no data is lost. But you need one ACA for each Exchange server, so this is primarily limited to SMBs and departments rather than large enterprises.

Prepare for Exchange 2007...
That means be ready to upgrade hardware. First, you'll need 64-bit servers to run it. You'll also likely need more disk.

Keith McCall, CTO of Exchanged managed server provider Azaleos, says Exchange 2007 will comfortably support 6,000 users per server, compared to 2,500 per server with Exchange 2003. But to take advantage of more users per server, you will need a lot more capacity. Take 6,0000 users at, say, 1 gig per user, and that comes to 6 Tbytes of usable storage.

"If you want to RAID 10 or RAID-DP it, you need 12 Tbytes and you have to reserve twice that if you want to recover in case of a disaster," McCall says. "The numbers start getting staggering."...But take your time

McCall, formerly part of Microsoft's Exchange team, recommends waiting until at least after the first service patch to go to Exchange 2007. "Typically, over 1,000 bugs are fixed in the first service patch," he says.

— The Editors, Byte and Switch