Update 1 Exchange

So what has been going on since my last post that was on.......January 4th? Well back in January One of our exchange servers had a hardware failure. This server was in our remote office in London. The server was down for a day or two b/c there was no hardware 4 hours turn around time waranty on parts. As a result of that some very important people could not get email on that end. This important person wanted this to never happen again. So I come up with a solution for both offices. (oh just to be clear I do not administer the london office, my counter part does that. My servers have 4 hour turn around time on parts.) With that said I've come up with a solution for both offices.

My solution is to cluster the exchange servers in both offices. Increasing the rundancy of the server. Both offices currtly have one exchange 2003 server. All email flows come into the NY office and goes to the LD office across our private line. Next week we will start this project in both offices. My solution requires two new exchnage server running on MS Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The information stores will be held on our SAN and in the SAN in the LD office. This is going to set ourselves up to start cloning the databases for backups and do away with tape, sort of. Our current exchnage 2003 server will act as a restore server. It will be hanging off the cluster so to speak and in the event of restoring that server will be the one mounting the database (information store).