E-mail continuity

loltim

loltim

loltim

Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
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Wellington, NZ
Guys,

what e-mail continuity systems are recommended these days, for Exchange servers?

I have in the past used a program called popcon, which will download e-mail from a separately created catchall mailbox on a different domain and deliver to the Exchange server when it's back online. Are hosting companies generally OK with you using their services as a backup? I know Heart Internet get a bit funny about it.

Just looking at http://www.messagestream.com/ - anyone used these? any other recommendations? What about GFI and MXsave.com?
 
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Use exchange with another off site exchange and use DAG.

Another option is mimecast, they do full mailbox continuity with webmail they even have an outlook plugin that takes reverts your connection to their servers when your exchange goes down. They also have mobile phone support for the service.

The dag works well because you can just failover to your DR exchange and its ready to go, as long as you have done the necessary wan config on that side. The mimecast outlook plugin is quite good and they do spam filter and mailbox archiving. The mobile phone continuity was not very good last time i used it though. more hassle than it was worth, but the rest of mimecast stuff is good.
 
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That sounds expensive groen.

Sorry should have detailed in the first post. Our clients are small businesses, often 30 employees or less. (hence using popcon in the past).
 
I think they offer prices based on users. It is not dirt cheap by any stretch but it depends what you want from it ie if you just want security and continuity then i don't think its as much, the real cost is the archiving i think. We deploy mimecast at all our clients ranging from 20-100s users.

To be honest ive only ever seen a few quotes for it and that was in the £1000s or so for 40 users per year with archiving. But when you compare it to other email continuity solutions i don't think its expensive otherwise some of the clients we have would not use it because they are tight at the best of times.

The continuirty with the archive i am not sure if you can do that, now that i think about it. It may work but obviously you won't be able to look through old email, just send and receive new email from the point of the DR event.
 
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We resell MessageExchange but for hosted Exchange rather than continuity / security. Worth speaking to them though as they have been good to deal with. Our account manager is on the ball and answers questions quickly.

You could also look at GFI Max - the anti-spam service, IIRC, provides 5 days of spooling if the upstream server is offline.

We also have our own "public" mail server (a VM in a DC) which we can create ETRN queues on. We use this to provide backup MX records for quite a few customers. As Ex 2010 dropped ETRN, we run a batch file as a scheduled task which makes the ETRN dequeue request to grab anything which ends up on the backup.
 
Some mail hygiene services will do this for you to a lesser or greater extent as suggested above.

Postini: - "spools" mail if your server is down. When Exchange comes back up, mail is delivered. Can't access the mail while it is being "spooled" though.

ExchangeDefender: - by default you get in/out archiving with these guys - therefore you can access the archive mailbox to respond to anything urgent (it works, but sending out mail from the archive mailbox uses an address that is different to your Exchange mail address).

If Exchange is unavailable this would suggest a software or hardware issue - you can mitigate these scenarios by setting up the software using best practices and using quality hardware backed up by same day support warranties (i.,e from Dell/HP etc.) and a UPS.

I support several small business using SBS in various forms. I always use a mail hygiene service. In the 6 years I've been doing this I've had one major outage - the RAID back plane in a month old Dell server blew taking several drives with it. This client had declined 4hr Dell hardware support so had to wait. They are using ExchangeDefender however and were able to access their archive mailboxes to catch anything urgent (they are now on 4hr! :D).

At the end of the day, for a small business, cost probably outweighs the advantages of having 100% continuity. You can do your best though as outlined above.
 
We tie ours into spam filtering, MX Force. I've used Postini in the past for the same purpose and much prefer it. We use Message Stream/Message Exchange for their Hosted Exchange service. Quite good and have only had 1 major outage in the last 2 years.
 
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