Assessing your current e-mail Infrastructure

Alex TurnerIntel / Microsoft Product Manager

Apex Computers

Embarking on an email archiving projectStarting out:

So you’ve decided to embark on an email archiving project…..where do you start?

The first step: Determine the business needs

• Business continuity – how critical is your email system?

• Server consolidation & optimisation – are your email (and other) servers efficient and cost-effective?

• Migrations – do you need to consider migration to a new email system as part of the project?

Business Continuity

• How critical is your e-mail system?

– A 2003 study found that a divorce would be less traumatic for IT managers than a weeklong failure of their corporate email system!

– Properly functioning email systems are so critical that 68% of companies said users get irate within as little as 30 minutes without email access.

– Within just 24 hours of email system failure, almost 1/5 of IT managers said their jobs would be on the line.

Business Continuity

Email archiving can help to improve recovery times after an email system failure, but how else can you prevent unplanned downtime?

• Server High Availability solutions– Microsoft / Domino Clustering– Doubletake– Marathon– VMware

Business Continuity

• Microsoft / Domino Clustering– Microsoft Clustering

• To deliver high availability on the Microsoft platform• Available to Microsoft certified applications only• Must have a shared storage medium• Is a viable HA offering although can be complex to set-up

and administer

– Domino Clustering• To deliver an HA offering for Lotus Domino• Viable HA offering but a Lotus specific technology only

Business Continuity

Double-Take Replication

One to OneActive/Standby

One to OneActive/Active Daisy Chain

Many to One One to Many Many to Many

Business Continuity

• Marathon

Mainframe-class availability (99.999%+ uptime)

Complete hardware

RedundancyCompute-through all failures

Ensures zero downtime

through minor and major faults

Ensures zero data loss

Server Consolidation & Optimisation

• Whilst not typically considered as part of an email archiving project, server consolidation and optimisation can enable significant cost savings and help to reduce the TCO for the project.

• Key areas to consider:– Server consolidation using blade technology – scale out– Server virtualisation using VMware – scale up– Ongoing Exchange maintenance using GOexchange

Server Consolidation & Optimisation

Server consolidation & optimisation can improve the TCO of your infrastructure by:

Reducing complexity Improving efficiency Increasing processor utilisation Enabling workload consolidation Raising productivity

In addition consolidation delivers:

• Higher levels of service to the business• Greater efficiency & control• Flexibility to respond to a changing environment

Re-architecting the infrastructure for efficiency

Server consolidation using Blade technology

Reversing “server sprawl”On demand transformation

Designing application platform of the futureSystems management tools critical

SAN Storage

Storage AreaNetwork

BladeCenter and Rack Servers

Server virtualisation using VMware

Introduction to VMware– Founded in 1998 to bring virtual machine technology to Industry

Standard Computers– Entered the Server market in 2001– Released VMotion and Virtual Centre in 2003 – the killer apps– June 2006 – VMware version 3 released with HA and DR functionality

added– Now have over 4 million users and 20,000 corporate customers

– Gartner predicts by 2009, 99% of servers shipped will be virtualised– Intel and AMD have coded virtualisation into their processors– Microsoft are building virtualisation to the core of their next Server

platform release

Server virtualisation using VMware

• For many email archiving solutions, for example EAS, you will need the following key applications:

- The email archiving software- SQL / Oracle for indexing the data- IIS for retrieving the data- Storage to retain the data- And of course, Exchange, Lotus Notes etc

• Rather than purchasing new servers, virtualise your existing servers with VMware.

Server Virtualisation

• Admiral Insurance– Admiral faced a number of ongoing server issues:

• Lack of physical space & air conditioning limitations• Lack of administration, systems management tools and

ability to provision a server rapidly• No centralised storage repository

– Apex addressed these by:• Designing, planning & implementing a VMware on IBM Blade

environment• Deploying centralised storage environment• Decommissioning the server sprawl that organically evolved

over time

Server Virtualisation

• Admiral Insurance– This meant that Admiral:

• Were capable of deploying new servers in minutes• Improved Server Utilisation from <10% to over

60%• Optimised Server Management • Reduce Energy & Cooling Costs• Had an environment ready to implement e-mail

archiving

Network Optimisation

• Of course server reliability and server performance are important but both rely on an optimised network:

– Optimised core LAN and integration with server systems– Positioning on the network of the core host systems– Positioning of network based storage e.g. IBM N series

IBM Bladecenter Network Switch IBM N series

Exchange maintenanceusing GOexchange

•

– Reduce your message stores by 30-55% initially

– Checks all Exchange databases for consistency

– Detects and corrects errors and warnings

– Repairs & checks public and private information stores

– Removes deleted items, and optimises databases

– Fixes corrupt Message Transfer Agent (MTA) databases

– Defragments the directory, public and private databases

Email Migration

- Email platform consolidation

- Lotus Domino to Microsoft Exchange Migration

- Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Domino Migration

- Microsoft Exchange / Lotus Domino Upgrades- Exchange 2003 vs 2007

Email Migration

- Exchange 2007 Server

- Likely Release Date…..- Exchange 2007 will be 64-bit only for production- More mailboxes per server supported with 64-bit- Large performance gains- More enhanced Security Permissions

64-b

it

Excha

nge

32-b

it

Excha

nge

Email Migration

• Email migration often forms part of an email archiving project…..but have you considered archiving first?

Customer Experience:

Vertex calculated that an email migration from Exchange 5.5 to 2000 would take around 76 hours, assuming no glitches.

This meant the company would be without e-mail for at least 3 days.

With EAS, they achieved the same result in just 22 hours.

• Reduce migration times

• Avoid overloading your new servers

• Give users transparent access to legacy data

Mailbox Migration Issues

• Migrations require a strategy for preserving legacy mail

• Typical approach has problems:– Mailboxes inactive during migration– Legacy mail uses maximum space in new

environment• No storage savings at all• Day 1 storage in Exchange equivalent to Domino

– Mail format degraded– Migrated mail may not be usable

• E.g. ‘From’ address no longer works– No easily accessible ‘compliance’ snapshot without

maintaining Domino environment forever

Conventional Mailbox Migration

DominoEnvironment

ExchangeEnvironment

Conventional Migration

Mailbox disabledduring migration

Introducing TransVault

Migrate an Archive instead

Use TransVault to migrate at ‘archive level’:

• Archive legacy Domino emails using ZANTAZ EAS• Migrate as a background process using TransVault• Put legacy folders & shortcuts into Exchange • Create a full content search catalogue for the legacy mail & new

mail

NB - EAS for Notes archive can be ‘offlined’ but is retrievable for discovery work.

TransVault Benefits

• Keeps new Exchange servers ‘clean’– Reduces Exchange costs and admin overhead

• Transparent migration – with users online – Removes downtime & ‘pressures’ of mailbox migration

• Superior format fidelity than all competitors tested– Results support discovery needs

• Benchmarked up to 10x speed of competing solutions– Significant benefit to large organisations

• Applies SIS to all Domino duplicates– minimises storage in archive

Archive Migration

DominoEnvironment

ExchangeEnvironment

TransVaultMigrator

DominoArchive

ExchangeArchive

Shortcuts put into Outlook

MailboxesLive throughout➼

MailboxesLive throughout ➼