Entries categorized under “Microsoft Exchange”

DCIG expects to unveil its DCIG 2012 Early Case Assessment (ECA) Buyer's Guide in Q2CY12. As prior Buyer's Guides have done, it puts at the fingertips of organizations a Buyer's Guide that provides them with a comprehensive list of ECA software that can assist them in this all-important buying decision while removing much of the mystery around how ECA are configured and which ones are suitable for which purposes. (read more)

It is rare to find is a storage configuration that improves the efficiency and manageability of large Exchange deployments even as it improves speed and performance. So it is notable that HP's recently released Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) results for Microsoft Exchange 2010 meet both existing and new enterprise requirements while tripling Exchange's database performance over that of competitive storage systems. (read more)

Virtualizing business critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 is the next frontier in server virtualization. But as organizations move down this path, sizing the underlying hardware that will host these applications becomes much more complex. This explains why we are seeing the emergence of reference configurations such as what HP has introduced for Microsoft Exchange 2010. (read more)

Email is the quintessential business-critical application, with every organization relying on it as a vital communications tool. It can pose real challenges for IT, however, as capacity gets swallowed up over time from emails accumulating in client mailboxes. Also, its 24/7availability demands and configuring it to support different server and storage platforms pile up the challenges that IT has to address in support of the application. (read more)

The introduction of Database Availability Groups (DAGs) into Microsoft Exchange 2010 has been a godsend for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) with less than 1000 employees as it gives them the same Exchange availability and reliability features once reserved primarily for large enterprises. But for enterprises with more than 1000 users, Exchange 2010 DAGs creates new storage challenges in SAN environments unless these three techniques for optimizing SAN storage utilization and performance are followed. (read more)

The introduction of Database Availability Groups (DAGs) into Microsoft Exchange 2010 is being hailed by many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) as a key technology to making high availability (HA) accessible and affordable since it enables the use of hard disk drives (HDDs) that are internal to a physical Exchange server. However the fact that SMBs can now use internal HDDs as part of Exchange HA solution does not necessarily mean they should. (read more)

Quite a few articles have already been written about the new Iomega StorCenter ix12-300r Network Storage Array with many of them focusing on the disruptive nature that this model is going to have on storage arrays intended for the midsized business space (250 users or less). But as I read many of these articles, they are overlooking some of the key reasons why it will be so disruptive. (read more)

There is a perception among enterprise organizations that in order to deploy continuous data protection (CDP) technology, they also need to use high performance disk in conjunction with it. But enterprises probably should re-assess that assumption. The emergence of new and better CDP architectures such as what InMage offers enables organizations to deliver high speed CDP while using slower performing SATA disk drives. (read more)

Anyone who has ever witnessed a disaster knows that one of two things can happen. Either the area affected by the disaster can be devastated, never to recover; or, new life can spring up in its place. In many respect, the economic disaster that hit the entire nation and world hit the data storage industry equally hard. However the data storage industry is picking itself back up and, based upon what I saw and heard this week at The BDEvent in Palo Alto, CA, it has brought an end to one era in data storage while the dawn of another is now upon us. (read more)

Last week's blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list. (read more)

Server virtualization was one of the hot technology trends in 2009 and there is every reason to believe it will remain that way in 2010. But as this trend broadens to include the virtualization of mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, new considerations come into play. Most notably, organizations must identify a data protection solution that can deliver application-consistent recovery points, bring applications quickly back online and do so without negatively impacting the performance of the physical host. (read more)

This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today's blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. (read more)

Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information. (read more)

This past spring a debate erupted on BackupCentral.com between a user complaining about not getting new features in his backup software as part of his annual maintenance contract and his backup software provider wanting to charge extra for it. The user was, in his words, 'faithfully paying his annual 20% fee for maintenance' and now wanted the backup software's new Advanced Recovery option as part of his support costs. (read more)

The recent launches of Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Servers 2008 R2 have been greeted with a lot of fanfare. But what can sometimes get lost in the mix is that as organizations look to adopt the latest versions of these operating systems there is a need to update the software that runs on these platforms. In that respect, keeping one's backup software up to date should be at or near the top of one's priority list when deploying any of these new OSes. (read more)

Making backup software easy and simple to use is the mantra for almost all products today. Yet knowing whether or not users will perceive a product as "simple and easy to use" is almost impossible to quantify until it is widely deployed in the field and users get some hands on experience with it. Well, apparently Symantec received a lot of feedback on what would make its NetBackup PureDisk 6.5 simpler and easier to use and took it to heart. (read more)

The impact of virtualization on the IT Infrastructure has shaken IT at its core. Virtualization is changing the current model of assigning one physical server for each application by effectively consolidating multiple servers onto one piece of server hardware and then optimizing its resources. Despite these benefits, virtualization initiatives can prove challenging. For example, deploying certain components of the IT infrastructure with backup and recovery is one area where there can be unanticipated challenges in the support of virtual infrastructures. (read more)

Moving aging, stale or infrequently accessed data from high cost, high performance production storage to lower cost, high capacity value tiers of storage can be easy to justify in enterprise organizations. However explaining the value proposition of archiving this same data in small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is sometimes less clear-cut as they may already store aging emails and file data on low cost local hard drives, inexpensive network file servers and even with Internet cloud storage providers. (read more)

"Disaster recovery (DR) may not be hot among our executive management team but they have definitely turned up the heat around DR." That statement, from a storage administrator at a university in the Pittsburgh area, is reflective of the new view that executives in all sizes of organizations are adopting right now in regards to disaster recovery. As the economy continues to slow and management has more time to focus on internal processes that need fixing, organizations are seeing definite gaps in their ability to protect and recover applications, which new solutions like Overland Storage's REO Business Continuity Appliance (BCA) can help resolve. (read more)

Data protection is a ubiquitous need that cuts across all size organizations and has resulted in dozens of products with specific features to address these needs. In fact, one can easily wonder why any vendor even thinks it stands a chance to compete by coming to market with new backup software. But still they do and part of the reason is that backup problems still persist; so much so that backup redesign has topped the list among end-users for three (3) years running as they struggle to meet new backup requirements. (read more)

Plug-n-play - that's part of the idea behind the Microsoft Exchange Storage Calculator spreadsheet which provides organizations the general guidelines that they need when planning and configuring the storage that will support an instance of Microsoft Exchange. However one should not assume that this spreadsheet takes into account every possible variable regarding storage systems - it most certainly does not and says as much within the spreadsheet. (read more)

Microsoft provides a large number of guidelines for how to properly configure storage systems that are used in conjunction with Exchange implementations. But an area where Microsoft often still comes up short is in providing best practices for configuring Exchange in conjunction with today's next generation storage systems. Many of Microsoft's storage recommendations are based on the assumption that organizations are deploying either direct attached storage (DAS) or storage systems with traditional RAID architectures. But with next generation storage systems such as the 3PAR InServ Storage Server that deliver features such as wide striping, old rules for Exchange storage configurations do not always apply. (read more)

No technology has become more ubiquitous or more critical to day-to-day business processes than email with Microsoft Exchange Server now arguably the email software that most businesses rely on. But even as Microsoft Exchange has become so widely adopted (65% across all organizations now use Exchange according to a recent report from Ferris Research) and the release of Exchange 2010 looms, information about how to optimally configure specific resources that Exchange uses still remains in short supply. Nowhere is this dearth of information more evident than in what new options are available to administrators as they look to configure and optimize the back end storage assigned to Exchange. (read more)

Synchronous replication may be viewed by users as the "Gold' standard when it comes to achieving the highest levels of application availability for business continuity and disaster recovery. But as I previously discussed, using synchronous replication for business continuity and disaster recovery can actually take longer and cost more for organizations to remotely recover applications than if they use asynchronous replication. Now organizations can use asynchronous software like InMage Systems Scout to deliver the same or better results as synchronous replication at a substantially lower cost. (read more)

A little over two years ago, an article appeared on the Smart Computing website that provided some tips for how to select the appropriate backup software for your PC. Of the tips it suggested, one of the more interesting was its recommendation to select backup software that stored data in a native format. Storing data in its native format eliminates the need to use backup software to recover it since any computer can access and recover the data. But this article was written for PCs. So the question that companies now need to ask is, "What do they need to consider before selecting a product that will allow them to store replicated data of its enterprise production servers in its native format?" (read more)