Mail server architecture - redundancy

Burnsy2023

Burnsy2023

Burnsy2023

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Currently, I have a small business setup where by mail is delivered to google apps and then collected by a POP connector to Exchange 2010.

I don't really like the way that this is done and want to find a better solution. the only hitch is, that if the office (with all the servers) burnt down, we still need business continuity. As it stands people could revert to gmail for email access. Ideally, I want our exchange server to be first for delivery, but gmail would still need to hold historical emails.

Is there either a way of getting all mail to deliver to two mail servers (on the same domain) or some way of uploading content from exchange mailboxes to google?
 
Why are you using Google Apps as the primary MX when you have Exchange in the first place? Can it be setup so that Google then push email to your Exchange after receiving it rather than you manually fetching it via POP3?

We have this sort of setup with MessageLabs but just for virus/spam filtering, they also do hosted archiving which would give you your backups.

Edit - even if Google push mail to your Exchange you will still not have backups of internal emails unless you forward all mail to there. What is your ideal scenario? What sort of access do people need and what backup solution do you currently have in place?
 
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NightShadow said:
Why are you using Google Apps as the primary MX when you have Exchange in the first place?
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Becuase then if we have an issue with the exchange server (DR situation), we still have serviceable email with recent messages.

NightShadow said:
Can it be setup so that Google then push email to your Exchange after receiving it rather than you manually fetching it via POP3?
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I've not found a way to do this yet.

NightShadow said:
We have this sort of setup with MessageLabs but just for virus/spam filtering, they also do hosted archiving which would give you your backups.
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Do you have any more information about exactly what the setup is?
 
I havn't looked too much into the hosted archiving side but if it's similar to other vendors who have been trying to sell me hosted archiving it means email will still be accessible in event of a server failure as you then connect to the hosted servers. The exact workings I am unsure of as I have been trying to avoid hosted solutions but we have multiple sites and off-site backups so all is not lost if a building goes up in flames. The way MessageLabs works for us is that we point our MX records to them, they scan and filter the emails and then they have an MX record for our server which the email then passes onto after filtering is done. It all works very well with not much delay in mail flow.

Have you looked into hosted Exchange or even connecting clients to Google directly?
 
Hi.

Have a look at Mimecast. Were moving from messagelabs to MC as they offer an archived mail solutio where if you loose access to your infrastructure for what ever reason you can direct users to a webmail addy and they have access to a % of there emails. If I recall correctly, the more you pay the more emails are archived.
Also gone to MC as theyre web filtering and email filtering is better than messagelabs, seems ML became complacent and now lack features compared to others in the market. This is for a fairly large law firm btw.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Neither of those seem to do continuity.
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It depends on what you want really. If you want an online archive of all email then both can offer that, but if you want direct webmail access to each individual email account then you'd need to look elsewhere or combine it with another solution.
 
York said:
It depends on what you want really. If you want an online archive of all email then both can offer that, but if you want direct webmail access to each individual email account then you'd need to look elsewhere or combine it with another solution.
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Online archiving isn't my primary aim; having a redundant system is.
 
groveis.com offer this service. I haven't used it but I know roughly how it works. Incoming emails get delivered to their MX which then deliver to local mailboxes and also deliver/queue mail to your Exchange server. If the exchange server is down then the mail will be queued and your users can access their mail via web or desktop apps at groveis.

Any emails sent by continuity users during an outage is also delivered to Exchange once back up.

By default the last 30 days of mail is kept in a users continuity mailbox. Alternatively the continuity mailbox will receive mail only during an outage (cheaper).
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Does anyone know of any reputable companies other than Messagelabs and Mimecast for email continuity?
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We use Webroot for our email antispam/antivirus & business continuity at work. The service as a whole has been great and we chose Webroot over MessageLabs/Postini/Mimecast/MIMEsweeper (although MIMEsweeper doesn't do archiving) because of the price, you do have to put up with the web interface which isn't as flashy as MessageLabs, it has all the features required it's just not as intuitive as others!
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
Mimecast will only retain emails for up to 10 years, Messagelabs will hold them indefinitely.

Might be important depending on your industry.
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I hope it won't take us more than a few days at worst to get our exchange server back up, so as long as it holds about 14 days mail, I'm happy.

How does the mail get delivered from these services to the onsite exchange server?
 
We have major redundancy in our mail setup.

We have 4 Exchange 2010 servers actually running the databases.
DAG's are created so that each server replicates to another.
On top of this we have CAS arrays.

It's a pretty robust system with regards hardware and Exchange 2010 is rock solid too.
 
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