Backup Central

Gurus,

We have a customer that is asking us to perform 6 Exchange Full backups daily. The reason for the frequency of the backups is because the customer wants a 2-3 hour recovery point. The servers that need to be backed up are running Exchange 2007 on Windows 2003. The Windows servers are in a 2 node cluster. Currently we are trying to perform 6 Full backups daily through TSM (TSM TDP client 6.1 to a TSM 5.5 server). The problem is all the backups cannot run due to the fact that one backup is still running when the next backup is scheduled to kick off. The TSM backups are trying to run on top of each other. Currently when we perform a full backup there is about 750 Gb worth of data and it takes about 5 to 6 hours to backup to TSM. We are hoping to incorporate some sort of snapshot technology to complete the 5 backups during the day and then have a scheduled TSM full backup run nightly.

We are hoping for a snapshot technology that provides the granularity to be able to restore a single user mailbox (and not the whole snapshot) if necessary back to the original Exchange server.

Thanks.

You have many choices. Array based snapshots, software snapshots through volume management components, or CDP. All of them will give you the RPO you're looking for and have various other pros and cons. They can all potentially give you the granularity you're looking for depending on the vendor.