Symantec Data Center Solutions for Microsoft Exchange

Symantec Data Center Solutions for Microsoft Exchange

INTRODUCTION Protecting data and applications was once a simple story: Establish a routine policy for business applications along with corporate data and back up all information seven days a week. As time passed and the volume of data increased, minimal improvements were made to shorten the backup window or reduce recovery time because it was challenging to have all data protected within the same backup window. Fast forward to the present: Rich media and databases push corporate data growth at an alarming pace, business applications are running on multiple platforms and are larger in size and complexity, and applications that were once thought of as luxuries, such as email, have shifted to mission-critical status requiring reliable protection. Corporate governance, industry regulations, and government compliance demand constant improvements and upgrades for processes, while sensitive data dramatically rises at remote sites with increased service level expectations, proving the infrastructure is anything but centrally managed.

THE CHALLENGE OF DATA CENTER COMPLEXITY Although data protection processes and technologies are among the most mature in information technology, the growing size, criticality, and complexity of data center environments coupled with the surge of demand placed on them are raising new challenges. Moreover, enterprises face increasing complexity when using multiple vendors for point solutions to solve problems of clustering, volume management, archiving (including email), file system management, and backup/recovery. This brochure outlines the synergy of the Veritas NetBackup Platform (which includes Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup PureDisk, and Veritas Backup Reporter), Symantec Enterprise Vault, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server to eliminate this complexity by delivering next-generation solutions with centralized, end-to-end management for heterogeneous protection services. This brochure is organized into three sections: Managing Storage, Protecting the Application, and Addressing Compliance and Discovery. MANAGING STORAGE As email has become the central hub for communication in the office, the amount and size of messages circulating has exploded. Managing storage for the inbound data within the environment has become a central issue and challenge for the system. To deliver the appropriate level of availability to Microsoft Exchange, a variety of protection requirements need to be considered, including storage management, application clustering, disaster recovery, and data protection. These disciplines minimize, or even eliminate, both planned and unplanned downtime. Symantec s market-leading Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows, Veritas Cluster Server, and Symantec Enterprise Vault products deliver industry-unique capabilities that seamlessly manage infrastructure, reduce costs, and continue to exceed the service level agreements expected by the business. An integrated software stack comprised of Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server Veritas Storage Foundation HA for Windows combines robust storage management and clustering to provide comprehensive protection against planned as well as unplanned downtime. Storage Foundation for Windows enables online administration of storage hosting Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and Enterprise Vault stores. For instance, manual or policy-driven automated online volume growth, online DAS to SAN migration, online array migration, and online volume re-layout. Veritas Cluster Server tightly integrates with Storage Foundation for Windows to ensure data, access to data, and applications that use or create data are protected at all times against local as well as site-wide failures. The integration between Storage Foundation and NetBackup enables operational simplicity. Arduous and complex scripts are no longer required, which is beneficial for initial set up, but the simplicity is also realized each time applications, databases, Storage Foundation, NetBackup, or hardware is upgraded, changed, or retired over time.

Storage Foundation and its FlashSnap facility provide organizations with the ability to take point-in-time copies of critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, as well as databases to create a consistent point-in-time copy that can be used for off-host processing, disk-based backup, and disk-based recovery. FlashSnap is completely storage hardware independent and is often used as part of a broader tiered storage strategy. Storage Foundation and NetBackup have the ability to seamlessly coordinate with the NetBackup Snapshot Client when a consistent point-in-time copy can be made and then handed to NetBackup for an off-host backup. This coordination helps to minimize the burden on production applications during backup processes. This same capability for Microsoft Exchange can be done with other applications on other non Windows platforms to help to streamline processes across the data center environment. Enterprise Vault enables organizations to eliminate quotas and message size restrictions and give users a mailbox of virtually unlimited size at the same time controlling message store growth. Enterprise Vault also leverages optimized single instance storage and compression technologies to further reduce the data footprint. By controlling the size of the storage footprint, the applications and servers hosting them remain focused on real-time transactions. The online archive also enables organizations to rationalize storage resources and dedicate primary storage to dynamic and transactional data. Older, less frequently accessed content can be moved to a secondary or tertiary storage device, saving money for more strategic purposes. Enterprise Vault can also help organizations to migrate and archive email s from end-user created.pst files into the archive repository while maintaining end user access. Centralizing user search and accessibility to this information enables companies to significantly reduce the amount of data stored in local and network based.pst. Ingesting this information and effectively eradicating these files improves performance, scalability, and eases maintenance of Outlook clients and Exchange servers. NetBackup and Enterprise Vault provide integration that enables customers to define automatic, policy-based migration strategies that move archived data from disk managed by Enterprise Vault to tape or other media managed by NetBackup. A policy can be set for transparent migration from disk to tape all under the management of NetBackup. Data remains visible, searchable and accessible to Enterprise Vault users, even though the data has moved to tape. Requests initiate a transparent recall of data from tape using NetBackup. As data expires from the Enterprise Vault archive, Enterprise Vault can instruct NetBackup to erase the data. Wherever Enterprise Vault data is stored whether tape or disk it is transparent to the user. This helps customers to define automation and policy-based migration strategies that move archived data from disk managed by Enterprise Vault to tape or other media managed by NetBackup, helping customers leverage their backup infrastructure to manage archived data. NetBackup can also protect the Enterprise Vault archive by migrating it to tape for longer-term storage. NetBackup PureDisk offers storage and bandwidth-optimized data protection for the data center, remote office, and virtual environments. It reduces the size of backups with a deduplication engine that can be deployed for storage reduction of disk backups by 10 times or more versus tape. PureDisk can reduce the size of Microsoft Exchange backups at the source, ideal for remote offices, smaller environments, or in the data center using proven application protection technologies. The

PureDisk deduplication engine can reduce the size of a full Microsoft Exchange backup by as much as 90%. All application agents use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to perform backup and restores of Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 Servers. For advanced, business-level reporting, Veritas Backup Reporter can report on Microsoft Exchange across NetBackup, Symantec Backup Exec, PureDisk and even third-party backup environments. Backup Reporter gives a business context to reporting which enables customers to track historical storage capacity growth as well as provide backup service level compliance reports such as Recovery Point Exposure for critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange. PROTECTING THE APPLICATION Because Microsoft Exchange has become the de facto standard for communication across most organizations, it is not surprising that employee productivity dramatically declines if email servers go down. To reduce the ramifications of this happening, a clear disaster recovery plan is an integral component of any organization. It is essential that companies implement reliable strategies for maintaining availability. The proven strategy for achieving this level of availability is by deploying Microsoft Exchange in a clustered environment with Veritas Cluster Server. While data protection solutions require application data to be recovered from disk or tape at a previous point in time, some applications require more rapid recovery from unplanned failures, and Microsoft Exchange is no exception. Veritas Cluster Server minimizes downtime of applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Enterprise Vault that comprise the messaging ecosystem with the ability to quickly detect failures and failover an application (running on physical or virtual server) to an available server over local, metropolitan, or wide-area distances. A few highlights of Veritas Cluster Server include cost-effective n+m clustering with as many as 32 nodes in a single cluster, disaster recovery across wide-area networks and different IP subnets, non-disruptive disaster recovery testing, centralized management from a single Web console, support for multiple operating systems and storage arrays, and integration with multiple-disk replication solutions, including Volume Replicator from Symantec. Veritas Cluster Server has the ability to monitor the health of the Enterprise Vault services and storage, and automatically trigger a failover if necessary to maintain system availability. NetBackup offers several different layers of protection for Microsoft Exchange depending on the recovery point objective (RPO) or recovery time objective (RTO). Because not all applications or environments require the same levels of protection, NetBackup provides the flexibility to pick the appropriate level while retaining central management. To ensure minimal application disruption, NetBackup provides a Microsoft Exchange agent that provides hot online backups. This prevents having to take the server offline or depend on scripting to export the application to the file system. To help reduce the amount of storage required for Microsoft Exchange backups, NetBackup has built-in, patent-pending,

Granular Recovery Technology (GRT). GRT allows for a single-pass backup while maintaining full disaster recovery and individual email, folder or mailbox restores. The benefit is that this single-pass backup allows for approximately half the storage over the previously required two-pass backup while maintaining equal recovery functionality. Depending on service levels, there is a variety of best practices for protecting Microsoft Exchange environments with NetBackup, including: Leverage Microsoft Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication or CCR (the capability to replicate data between clustered nodes) or Local Continuous Replication or LCR (the ability to replicate locally between two disk volumes). The NetBackup client with the Microsoft Exchange agent option recognizes CCR or LCR environments and will always back up the passive node. It also allows for control if it should failover to backing up the active node if the passive node is not available. Off-host backup using the NetBackup Enterprise Client with the Microsoft Exchange agent option allows a snapshot to be taken of the Microsoft Exchange instance and then mounted on an alternative server to perform the backup. This practice is ideal for heavily utilized, 24x7 production systems that cannot afford the disruptions or slowdowns that are caused by regular backups. All of the benefits previously described with GRT and CCR/LCR can be realized without having a performance impact on the Microsoft Exchange server because the NetBackup server is sending the data to the backup infrastructure. Microsoft Outlook users continue to use Microsoft Exchange after the snapshot has been taken while NetBackup does all of the heavy lifting. Through the hardware array or file system (such as Veritas Storage Foundation), the Snapshot Instant Recovery feature available within the NetBackup Enterprise Client provides the ability to schedule, catalog and retain snapshots. This allows users to retrieve point-in-time copies from disk for the fastest recovery possible. Data is captured locally at the client, and therefore, does not need to move data across the network or to tape. Only catalog entries (metadata) are sent to the NetBackup server to accurately track the point-in-time copy that was created or identified for use with the NetBackup software. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology provided by NetBackup RealTime Protection captures every write at the LUN level. This provides a higher level of protection than regular backup and snapshots by offering any point-in-time restore. In the event of a disaster, NetBackup provides integrated Bare Metal Restore. This allows a Windows (or UNIX or Linux ) server to be recovered within minutes from a network boot. This requires minimal user intervention, automated hardware discovery, and the ability to recover to dissimilar hardware. For added protection, Veritas Cluster Server provides resiliency to both the NetBackup Master Server and the Veritas

Backup Reporter Management Server and agent to ensure seamless failover onto another node in the event of a failure with the primary node. Veritas Cluster Server technology is also integrated within NetBackup PureDisk to ensure automated online failover of any node in the disk-backup storage pool. ADDRESSING COMPLIANCE AND DISCOVERY With the increasing criticality of email and the adherence of government regulations, search and discovery have been an integral part of any organization. Specifically, IT is being asked to: Ensure that electronic records, including unstructured content such as email and IM, are being collected, indexed, and retained according to corporate policies Respond rapidly to requests for finding specific documents and emails in backup and storage based on the context, such as date, sender or recipient, and content, including keywords, subject line, and attachments Retrieve unstructured data from all variety of devices, including laptops and handhelds Restore data and present it in native format Symantec Enterprise Vault facilitates data collection, storage, and discovery, and helps demonstrate compliance with laws and standards. This enables organizations to: Proactively enforce email, file, and document retention policies Optimize data collection and ensure accessibility in order to reduce search, review, and legal discovery costs Comply with governance rules and standards and increase litigation preparedness Enforce legal holds on data destruction Today, legal departments and IT must work together to develop email retention systems that not only ensure that records are not accidentally lost or deleted, but can also ensure rapid recovery. Organizations faced with litigation involving e-discovery must be able to apply indefinite litigation hold of relevant content with minimal strain on storage and IT resources. Enterprise Vault enables the discovery of content within email, file system, and collaborative environments. It manages content via automated, policy-based archiving to online stores for the retention and retrieval of information. The software manages archived information according to defined policies, including policies governing the amount of time files are retained. It enables managers to set unique retention polices for different types of information and protect archived items from deletion or expiry to save them for litigation. All content is fully indexed so archived information can be rapidly accessed, and indexing supports more than 350 file types so a search can find information within a zip file, email, Microsoft Office document, and more. Enterprise Vault software works seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange journaling in order to satisfy the corporate legal or regulatory retention requirements. Enterprise Vault can be configured to retain a copy of all email messages sent and received, ensuring that they are kept for the appropriate period of time required to meet regulatory or legal retention requirements

Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator extends the basic search functionality to deliver more powerful and efficient search capabilities, configurable enforcement of items during a litigation hold, and flexible export capabilities to simplify production. This helps organizations search for and manage information related to legal cases. It allows multiple individuals to perform complex searches across multiple archives and with multiple criteria in order to efficiently produce information for court readiness. Of key importance is that the software agent enables the creation of automated legal holds, ensuring that email, IM, and other records relevant to litigation are not deleted as part of an organization s retention and deletion schedule. SUMMARY Protecting a mission-critical application should not entail multiple point solutions across several vendors. Instead, it is imperative to standardize on a well-established and reputable vendor that provides solutions that solve business problems. Symantec provides market-leading, award-winning solutions across storage management, high availability, data protection and archiving that work together to master the complexities associated with protecting Microsoft Exchange. More information Visit our Web site: http://enterprise.symantec.com To speak with a Product Specialist in the U.S.: Call toll-free 1 (800) 745 6054 To speak with a Product Specialist outside the U.S.: For specific country offices and contact numbers, please visit our Web site. About Symantec Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com. Symantec World Headquarters 20330 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014 USA. +1 (408) 517 8000, 1 (800) 721 3934 www.symantec.com Copyright 2008 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Backup Exec, Bare Metal Restore, Enterprise Vault, FlashSnap, NetBackup, PureDisk, Storage Foundation, and Veritas are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 10/2008 20001718