Continuous Availability: Active ShadowMailboxes™

MailShadow® delivers a consistent Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 10 minutes. How does it manage that? First off, there’s no need to fire up the recovery server. It’s already up and running—and the Exchange information stores on it are already current and accurate. That’s because MailShadow employs a transaction-based replication scheme which, for each protected Outlook user, acquires from Exchange all email, folder, calendar and contact transactions and then transmits them to the corresponding mailbox on the recovery server.

Each of these transactions then is processed on the live recovery server just as they are on the primary server, with MailShadow working to ensure in real time that each replicated mailbox is fully synchronized with its equivalent on the primary server. MailShadow also validates that each transaction is complete and fully formed before transferring it.

By contrast, traditional file and block-replication solutions regularly mirror everything to the recovery server and then scramble like crazy to mount the Exchange information stores once an outage occurs on the primary servers.

All of which is well and good except for one little thing—many times you find you can’t immediately mount the Exchange information stores because they contain corrupt data. And yes, that does indeed throw some light on a dirty little secret about file and block-level replication solutions…in the course of mirroring absolutely everything, they manage to faithfully transfer corrupt data right along with all the good stuff because they don’t perform any sort of data validation.

As a result, you could very easily find yourself holding the bag. Your DR vendor will proudly tell you that its RTO commitment has been met since your recovery server came up within the promised amount of time and all your (corrupt) data proved to be fully intact. Never mind that you can’t mount that data or that it might take you hours—or days—of intense work to get it to mount. And then there’s also the small matter of explaining to the company brass why, with all that money that’s been spent to implement a DR strategy, it still took you three days to get Exchange back online.

MailShadow ensures transaction-consistent mailboxes on a live shadow Exchange server, so you can always rest assured that highly available ShadowMailboxes are always on hot standby.

Request a call today and find out how you can keep your email available non-stop with MailShadow.