Interview with Bob Williamson, Senior Vice President, SteelEye Technology. 
SteelEye - the leading developer of high availability clustering solutions recently announced that LifeKeeper supports Microsoft Exchange 2007 both in LAN and WAN environments. We interviewed Mr. Bob Willamson who explains the challenges and options when securing business critical Exchange servers.

How critical is the role that MS Exchange performs in a modern organization?

Each year, SteelEye conducts the Business Continuity Index Survey which asks a number of questions about corporate plans around business continuity.  Each year we ask the companies to rank the most critical IT functions to protect in a disaster.  Customer support and Email always rank as the top two critical functions.   In the 2007 survey, 61% of companies said that protecting email was either “Extremely Important” or “Vital to Our Business”.

Is there a typical customer who protects the continuity of Exchange server with LifeKeeper?

Customer sizes range widely from a 20 person company office to multinational organizations. Most SteelEye customers wish to combine data replication with application failover.  For example the LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Exchange 2007 allows customers to have a complete HA/DR solution for Exchange 2007. LifeKeeper is Cost Effective because our flexible configuration options allow the customer to re-utilize existing hardware. SteelEye Data Replication eliminates the need to deploy a SAN to provide both HA and DR protection.

In general, what is the most typical reason for service break or failure in Exchange server, and how can LifeKeeper clustering can help protect against these disruptions?

The most common causes of outage for any application, whether it is Exchange, SQL Server or any other application, is human error or software error.  Hardware is very stable and resilient today. LifeKeeper solves this problem by monitoring all software components of the Exchange application and automatically performing a recovery action in the event of any software (or hardware) error.  LifeKeeper will first try a “local recovery” on the same server where Exchange is running.  This provides the fastest possible recovery and takes advantage of the fact that hardware is probably not the primary cause of Exchange outages.

Scheduled maintenance tasks can also be done without interruptions when using LifeKeeper HA clustering. Through our easy-to-use LifeKeeper GUI, you can manually migrate Exchange services and all of the associated users between servers.  This lets administrators install service packs and perform other maintenance tasks without downtime.  The need to schedule a maintenance window is now obsolete.

SteelEye LifeKeeper high availability clustering solutions now supports Microsoft Exchange 2007 too. What is special about this release?

The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Exchange 2007 provides a complete solution for Exchange Business Continuity including:

• HA – LifeKeeper was the first Exchange HA clustering solution and continues to lead in the area of Exchange availability
• Disaster Recovery – SteelEye Data Replication (SDR) allows administrators to provide protection for Exchange across a WAN or LAN.
• Data Protection – SteelEye Data Replication provides real-time synchronous or asynchronous replication of Exchange data.  In addition, SteelEye Data Replication features CDP, allowing administrators to rewind their target volume to any point in time prior to a corruption event.
• SteelEye Data Replication provides Continuous Data Replication and Rewind (CDP)
• LifeKeeper supports automatic failover and failback.
• LK/SDR supports multiple databases per storage group.
• LifeKeeper provides application and system level monitoring.
• SDR provides 9 levels of compression and WAN optimization, including bandwidth throttling

What is the key advantage of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) when protecting MS Exchange?

CDP allows administrators to roll their data back to any point in time, so you can always recover from any type of data corruption.  We have a built-in Data Recovery Wizard which makes it very simple to do this rollback. LifeKeeper constantly monitors all pieces of exchange and recognizes when any piece has a problem.  It then takes an automatic recovery action so that users are not aware that there has been a problem. 

Exchange has many roles in business critical use. Does LifeKeeper protect all of these critical roles?

Yes, all critical components are monitored and recovered automatically in the event of a failure. The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Exchange can protect the 3 main server roles of Exchange 2007, including HUB Transport, Client Access and Mailbox roles, all running on the same server.  This eliminates the need to deploy multiple servers for each role.

Is there any limitation in distance between sites when implementing a geographically distributed cluster?

There are no limitations. LifeKeeper supports unlimited distances between sites.  There is no special hardware required.  You simply must ensure that you have enough bandwidth to keep up with the data that is being replicated. LifeKeeper is designed to be flexible and scalable to suit all needs to ensure the continuity of modern IT systems.

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