Best practice: Simultaneously upgrade your Exchange and disaster recovery protection

Best practice: Simultaneously upgrade your Exchange and disaster recovery protection March 2006 1601 Trapelo Road Waltham, MA 02451 1.866.WANSync www.xosoft.com

Contents The Value Proposition... 1 Description of the Solution... 2 Why Disaster Recovery Planning Is Important... 2 InMotion: What It Does and How It Works... 5 InMotion and WANSync A Shared Engine for Shared Tasks... 6 Continuous Exchange Availability with WANSync... 8 Example Scenarios... 9 Implementing the Solution... 10 Other XOsoft Products... 10 Contact Information... 10

The Value Proposition An upgrade of your Exchange server to more powerful hardware presents an ideal opportunity to upgrade your business continuity capability as well. When you use XOsoft s InMotion to move your Exchange installation from your old server to the new one, you not only significantly reduce the effort of the move, you also get an installed WANSyncHA business continuity solution that leverages your old Exchange server. All you need to do is decide where to locate your old server and then switch on the protection.

Description of the Solution Your decision to invest in an upgrade of your Exchange server hardware is also a statement that the messaging and collaboration capabilities of your organization are important to your ability to function as a business. And if the capabilities are important, certainly their availability, whether that be during day-to-day operation, over the course of the upgrade or during other maintenance tasks, or in the event of an unexpected problem, from a weather-related disaster to a fiber cut to a simple software or user error. These risks and their potential impact are all too real and it is important to consider how, not whether, you will manage them. By considering XOsoft s InMotion, you are in fact already considering investing in a technology that will help you manage both the complexity of your upgrade and the risk of potential downtime during its implementation. By making the investment, you will have also invested in the technology required to continue managing the risk of downtime going forward after the upgrade is over. Since the engine that powers InMotion is the basis for all of XOsoft s continuous application availability solutions and since you have backup hardware in the form of your older Exchange server, you have, in fact, a fully installed solution for business continuity that needs only to be activated. How that works and what it is worth is the topic of this paper. Since you may be considering InMotion from the focused point of view of reducing the complexity of your Exchange hardware upgrade, we will spend time first discussing business continuity itself why it is important and what it really accomplishes. Then we ll cover just how InMotion works to ease the upgrade process while protecting against the risk of extended downtime. Finally, we ll discuss how the already-installed WANSync solution can extend that protection to provide ongoing business continuity support. Why Disaster Recovery Planning Is Important At the time of writing of this paper, awareness of the impact of disasters is still high as a result of the devastating effects of the 2005 North America hurricane season, which followed on the hurricanes and blackouts of other recent years. Nevertheless, a recent study by AT&T and the International Association of Emergency Managers confirmed what similar studies show over and over again most businesses either have no plan at all to deal with a disruption or have failed to keep what planning they ve done up to date. Even more astounding, of those businesses that have already experienced one disaster, nearly a quarter have yet to take any action to minimize disruptions in the future. Page 2

Why are business continuity capabilities important? The study showed that almost twothirds of companies that suffered a disaster lost business as a result, with 16% losing between $100,000 and $500,000 per day. An earlier study by accounting firm McGladrey and Pullen found further that 43% of companies that experience a disaster never re-open and 29% close within two years. Of those that do manage to survive, the long-term financial impact can be tremendous. If business continuity planning is so important, why don t companies do it? There are four major reasons companies choose not to make such planning a priority: (1) they don t expect a major disaster to occur, (2) they believe it is too expensive, (3) they believe it is too complex, and (4) they believe that it is pure expense and it is difficult to get upper management to pay for something that does not add value. Let s consider each of these statements in turn. Chances of a major disaster are low Unless you are located in a region that experiences weather problems on a regular basis, this may be strictly true, but reveals a lack of awareness of what usually causes disruption. In fact, only 5% of failures are caused by the types of events we think of first when we think about disaster planning, such as natural disasters like floods and hurricanes, or large-scale technological problems like a regional blackout. Most major disasters have far more mundane causes, like fiber cuts, viruses and especially software and human errors. The real chances of something happening are much higher than the word disaster might lead you to think. But if it brings your business to a halt, it s a disaster, whether the cause is spectacular or not. Page 3

Business continuity is too expensive? First, we should point out that in the upgrade scenario discussed here, the incremental cost to upgrade to a sophisticated business continuity solution is actually very small. More generally, this is a belief is based on a partial truth there are indeed some very, very expensive solutions out there. But it is also true that there is a wide range of costeffective options available. You probably don t need to get the most expensive and advanced capabilities in order to achieve the level of protection you require. What you do need is to realistically assess the risks and come up with a cost baseline that drives what is worth spending on the protection. This is not difficult to do. You need simply estimate the cost of your downtime, consider the kinds of problems you ll need to protect against and then estimate the likelihood that they will occur within, say, a year, as well as how long they would likely cause you to be down. Keep in mind that a rough conservative estimate is much better than no estimate at all. Multiplying these three factors together gives you a good guide to how much you should spend on protection. For example, if you are in a river basin, you might consider the impact of a flood. If your estimated downtime cost is $50,000 per day, you think the chance of a flood is 10% and you expect to be down for a week, you should consider spending up to 10% X 7 days X $50,000 = $35,000 to protect against this disaster. On the other hand, if you estimate a 25% chance of server failure of any type and an expected 4 hours downtime at a cost of $4,000 per hour, you should only consider spending about $4,000 on technology to mitigate this risk. Page 4

Simple estimate: for given time period, multiply Downtime cost Threat probability Downtime 10% chance of flood 7 days $50,000/day = $35,000 25% chance of server failure 2 hrs $4,000/hr = $2,000 100% chance of maintenance 20 hrs $2,000/hr = $10,000 Implementing a business continuity solution is too complex Some solutions are complex and justifiably so. Unfortunately, there has been a good deal of software sold that is unnecessarily complicated to install, configure and use. This is nothing more than poor design. InMotion is designed to noticeably and effectively reduce the complexity of your Exchange hardware upgrade and, once your upgrade is complete, your new business continuity solution is essentially already deployed. In addition, ease of management and automation are fundamental design principles for all of XOsoft s software, and WANSync is an excellent example of this. Configuration of an Exchange scenario is a matter of minutes since parameters are automatically set to defaults appropriate for the application being managed and Exchange data and configuration parameters are auto-discovered. In most cases, only three or four parameters need be set and the solution is ready to start. InMotion: What It Does and How It Works Let us turn now to look at how InMotion works to reduce the cost and complexity of your Exchange server upgrade. InMotion is a unique software solution designed to move data and mailbox accounts between Exchanges servers quickly and automatically, while limiting user downtime to under five minutes. The product can be used to perform a variety of tasks, but in this paper we are interested particularly in its use to upgrade your Exchange server to more powerful hardware, with or without an additional software upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003. There are several major benefits to the way InMotion allows your upgrade to be performed: Configuration and verification of your new Exchange server is performed automatically; Migration of users, mailboxes and server functions is fully automated Mailboxes are moved in bulk while users remain online; Total user downtime is less than 5 minutes essentially just the time required to stop Exchange on the old server and start it on the new one; You can quickly recover back to the original server if anything goes wrong with the migration. Page 5

Let us take a look a just how InMotion accomplishes these benefits. Figure 1: Operation of InMotion After Windows and Exchange are installed on the new hardware and InMotion is installed on both servers, the use of InMotion to carry out your server upgrade is quite simple. Preparation for the move is accomplished through a wizard interface that makes the configuration straightforward. Figure 2 then illustrates the procedure from that point. While users continue to work normally on your current Exchange server, InMotion configures the target Exchange installation and then copies all relevant data over to the new server. Once a full copy exists on the new server, real-time replication of all changes as they occur on your old server ensures that the data on the new server are kept constantly up-to-date until you are ready to switch users over. When you are ready, InMotion takes care of switching all users and services to your new Exchange server. The data has already been copied over, so the switchover takes just a few minutes essentially the time required to stop Exchange on one server and start it on the other. And if something goes wrong with the migration? Up to now any downtime incurred by a manual procedure is presumably planned. As any experienced administrator knows, however, things can go wrong even in the best-planned migration or upgrade and it is quite possible for the resulting downtime to go much longer than planned. Here the capabilities of InMotion are invaluable simply trigger a recovery back to the original server and in a matter of minutes you are back up and running. InMotion and WANSync A Shared Engine for Shared Tasks So what does this have to do with ongoing protection from disaster? Consider what is involved in performing the functions that InMotion performs. Once the scenario is configured and the target Exchange server configuration is complete, InMotion must: 1. Perform a full synchronization of the data on your current server to the new one; Page 6

2. Do real-time replication of changes as they occur from your current server to the new one once initial synchronization is complete to ensure that the data on both is identical at the time of switchover; 3. Know how to manage Exchange services and data to start and stop Exchange and verify that things happen correctly; 4. Manage and transfer Exchange server roles, like the Recipient Update Service and Routing Group Master; 5. Interact with Active Directory to re-home user mailboxes to the new server. As it happens, these comprise a large subset of what a business continuity solution built on real-time replication and automated failover must do. In fact, the XOsoft components that are installed on the Exchange servers to enable InMotion to carry out its tasks are precisely the same as those used by WANSync to perform its tasks. In particular, the two products share a service called the XOsoft Engine that runs on all the servers involved. The engine is responsible for managing services on the machine where it runs, starting and interacting with the file-system filter driver that captures changes to Exchange data as they occur in order to replicate them to another server, interacting with the Engine on other servers to transfer the data over the network and, of course, interacting with the management console which directs the engine to carry out the tasks appropriate to its purpose, either migration of the Exchange server by InMotion or disaster recovery and high availability functionality by WANSync. So let us now turn to WANSync and what it does. Page 7

Continuous Exchange Availability with WANSync WANSync is a highly cost-effective solution that combines several technologies to provide continuous availability of Exchange and other application servers through a wide range of potential disruptions, from server failure to data corruption to the loss of an entire site. The key technologies that WANSync uses to provide Exchange availability are: Asynchronous host-based software replication; Automatic monitoring of your production application, including server availability, Exchange services, and the state of your Exchange data; Push-button or auto-triggered failover of Exchange users to a backup machine on the same network or over the WAN; Push-button failback of Exchange to the original server; Continuous data protection based on XOsoft s Rewind Technology for recovery from data corrupted by virus action or user or application error. Figure 3 illustrates how WANSync works. The XOsoft engine is installed on the production and backup Exchange server. The engine captures changes to Exchange data as they occur on the production server and replicates them to the secondary server, which may be located anywhere. At the same time, the engine on the replica constantly monitors the state of the production Exchange server, including the state of individual Exchange stores and databases, triggering an alert to the administrator in the event of any problem. WANSync may be configured to automatically trigger a failover in this case or the administrator may trigger it manually by pressing a failover button. In either case, once triggered, failover and failback are fully automated. Figure 2: Exchange Continuity with WANSync Page 8

Built into the product is a continuous data protection capability. Should Exchange data be corrupted on the production server, any replication product will simply copy that corruption to the backup server, yielding two corrupted servers! However, WANSync continuously records the information required to undo operations and allows the administrator to rewind the Exchange data back to any previous consistent state prior to the corruption. Since corruption generally does not affect the entire server, WANSync s rewind may be performed on an individual database, storage group, or the information store, as appropriate. All of this capability is built into the engine that you install when you install InMotion. Since XOsoft does not license installation of the software, but only the ability to manage scenarios of particular types, all you need to do to take advantage of this powerful solution is to install the WANSync manager on any machine with TCP/IP access to your Exchange servers and then to enter the appropriate license key. Example Scenarios There are two basic ways to leverage your old server to achieve business continuity protection with WANSync, depending on the availability of a physically separate site at which to locate it. An ideal way to upgrade to business continuity protection using WANSync is to physically relocate your old server to a different site, perhaps a branch office of your company located in a different city. The bandwidth between the sites must be sufficient to support replication, of course, but this means sufficient for the daily volume of changes to the data only. Once you have installed your old server at a second site and configured and started a scenario, you gain the ability to continue Exchange service to your users even in the event of a complete loss of your primary site, as well as less devastating disruptions. In a matter of minutes, all users will be redirected to the backup server and will be able to continue working normally. No changes of any kind are required on users client machines. If a physically distant site is not available, there is still significant value in implementing a local Exchange replica using WANSync. If you are not using Microsoft cluster technology, the local replica gives you a less complex, but similar solution. If you are already using clustering, WANSync can protect you against loss of the shared storage of the cluster. And in either case, WANSync provides the additional value of continuous data protection technology to recover from data corruption. More information on how WANSync works with Microsoft cluster service to extend their protection to off-site replicas is available at: http://www.xosoft.com/solutions/clusters.shtml Page 9

Implementing the Solution Implementation of the solution is absolutely straightforward, consisting in the following steps. 1. Install Exchange on your new server hardware. It is not necessary to configure Exchange since InMotion will do that automatically. 2. Install the XOsoft engine on both the current server and the new one. We recommend using the WANSync installation package, but the InMotion package may be used as well. 3. Carry out your Exchange migration as documented in the InMotion User Guide. 4. If you have upgraded Exchange as well as the hardware, upgrade Exchange on your old server. Relocate the old Exchange server to another site now, if you are going to do so. 5. Install the WANSync Management GUI on any Windows machine with network access to the two servers, enter the license information, and configure your business continuity scenario as documented in the WANSyncHA Exchange 2000/2003 Operations Guide. 6. Start the scenario. Congratulations! You now have support for continuous availability of your critical Exchange messaging and collaboration infrastructure. Note that there is literally zero additional Exchange downtime involved in the upgrade. To further ease the implementation process presales technical support and demos are provided free of charge. Other XOsoft Products XOsoft offers several other products to protect access to your critical data and applications, as well as to add value through fast and completely flexible content delivery. Please check out our website or contact a XOsoft representative for more information. WANSync for Disaster Recovery WANSync for Content Delivery Enterprise Rewinder A 14 day trial evaluation of the software is available for download at: http://www.xosoft.com/download/index.shtml Contact Information North America (1.866.WANSync) International Headquarters New York West Coast Israel 1601 Trapelo Road Waltham, MA 02451 Tel: 781.419.5200 Fax: 781.419.5252 36 th floor 250 West 34th Street New York, NY 10119 Tel: 212-849-6838 Fax: 212-849-6901 19925 Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014-2358 Tel: 408-725-7134 Fax: 408-725-7144 5 Menahem Begin Ave. P.O. Box 31 Beit Dagan 50250, Israel Tel: +972-3-9775560 Fax: +972-3-9775561 Email: Tinfo@xosoft.comT Web: Thttp://www.xosoft.comT Page 10