Buying Exchange Migration solutions is a bit like shopping for health insurance. It’s not something you expect to need on a daily basis and so it’s probably not something you’re interested in blowing your whole budget on. But then you also have to consider that DR protection is something you’re surely going to need from time to time—and when you do, you’re going to want all the protection you can get just as soon as you can get it. In a perfect world, that would mean immediate satisfaction. But that unfortunately comes at a very steep price. So a more likely idea is to aim for a DR solution that assures you of a reasonably short Recovery Time Objective (RTO) at a cost you can live with.

Sadly, traditional file and block-replication systems miss that mark by a wide margin simply because they require you to make a substantial financial commitment right at the outset—without so much as providing you with the sort of ironclad RTO assurances that you really need.

There’s much to give you pause here. First of all, there’s the initial cost of acquiring one of the traditional DR solutions. As the graph above shows, that cost tends to grow in inverse proportion to the size of the quoted RTO. Beyond that, though, traditional DR solutions for Exchange also take an “all or nothing” approach. That is, if you buy into one of these solutions, you’re committed to applying it to every single mailbox on your system—even those that fall well short of “mission critical” status. So be prepared for a final sticker price that ’s apt to be a doozy!

And that’s just for starters. The hardware and administrative costs associated with running a traditional DR solution are no less exorbitant. And then there also are all those recurring WAN costs to take into account. Be advised that traditional file and block replication solutions were never intended for use with WANs. And it really shows, because they turn out to be major bandwidth hogs.

MailShadow® is a whole different story. You’ll discover that immediately once you start penciling out the acquisition costs—primarily because MailShadow lets you move towards a universal disaster recovery program in affordable stages by allowing you to license the technology on a per-mailbox basis. That means that you can choose to start out with a solution that replicates just a subset of critical mailboxes selected from multiple Exchange servers, thus allowing you to acquire immediate protection for your most important users at a cost you can readily afford. Then, over time, as you work to improve the overall reliability of your Exchange infrastructure, you can continue scaling up your replication solution in proportion to your requirements—and your budget constraints.

MailShadow then continues to save you money over time by working to minimize WAN consumption in a variety of ways. Most significantly, MailShadow transmits transactions only once, whereas traditional file replication solutions transmit the same data multiple times (in the form of both transaction .log files and .edb files, for example). MailShadow, by comparison, passes along only transaction-specific information for a select number of mailboxes.

And MailShadow also delivers recurring savings in the form of reduced administrative overhead. In part, that’s because MailShadow’s software management approach has been designed to be intuitive for Exchange administrators and is entirely consistent with the Active Directory management scheme. Perhaps even more significant, though, are all the added DR management burdens that MailShadow administrators won’t need to concern themselves about. Administrators of traditional DR solutions, unfortunately, cannot say the same.