Business Case Studies
Solutions
Overview
Fully Managed Email Hosting
ISP and Mail Gateway
Centralized Internet Email
Distributed Multi Location Setup
Co-existance solutions
Mail Scanning Relay Server
Integrate with MS ADS
Recommendations
Using Mail Policies effectively
Lower Cost Greater Flexibility
Desktop Address Book
Disaster Recovery Capability
Email Archival Capability
Preventing a Disaster
Improved Security
Progress
Mobile Access to email
Backup Strategies
Benefit Analysis
Are you ready for a disaster?
Context
Disaster planning for the mail server.
Situation
  • 7 PM - The RAID controlled of a mail server running for 2 years non-stop, just crashed at one of our large customer sites (a leading BPO organization). The services were offline for over 16 hours.
  • 2 AM - At an IT Company, which has international clients, the hard disk of the mail server running for over 2 years reliably, just failed. Partial recovery of services took upto 10 hours..
  • 3 PM - The data center of one of the leading research organizations caught fire. All the servers were gutted. No backups available. The Mail server had to be rebuilt from scratch. Data lost.
Enterprises often fail to adequately plan and provision for recovery from disasters resulting in large downtimes and related disruption to business. It's important to understand that even servers under warranty can fail and data loss can occur (even if the evendor adheres to the response and resolution times committed to bring the server alive).
Practice Technique Description Time to restore services
Basic Availability Backups Ensure backups of all servers are taken to a separate PC/server in the network, onto a secondary device (tape, usb device) and a copy kept offsite with rotations done at regular intervals. The recovery procedure is to procure hardware, install the OS, install MCS and restore the backup. 8-10 hours
Basic Availability Standby server Maintain a hot standby server with OS and Mithi Connect Server installed and ready to be deployed in case of a failure. This will have to be kept up to date with all upgrades, services packs and hot fixes as they are deployed on the Primary. Keeping this handy will save time while getting a secondary to replace a primary. It will require the data to be restored from the backups to take it live. 2-3 hours
Enhanced Availability Disaster recovery solution Deploy the Disaster recovery solution for Mithi Connect Server. This keeps the secondary server up to date in real time and provides a simple switchover to the secondary in case of a failure on the primary. The secondary can also be kept at a remote location. 15 mins
High availability Load balanced setup Deploy the HA solution for Mithi Connect Server. It comprises redundant compute only servers attached to a shared storage, accessed via a clustered set of load balancers. If a server is to fail or even get overloaded, the load balancer will take it off line and continue distributing the load to the remaining servers. Hands free instant