Bulletproof ShadowMailboxes™

In a perfect world, you’d love to be able to assure every last one of your users of continuous, disaster-proof access to their email. Maybe you can afford that and maybe you can’t. But there are certain people in the organization that you absolutely must keep up and operating without interruption.

That’s why MailShadow® has been designed as a continuity and content management solution you can license on a per-mailbox basis. That means you can start out with a configuration that replicates just your most critical mailboxes, giving immediate protection to your most important users at a cost you can manage.

Then, over time, as you work to improve the overall reliability of your Exchange infrastructure, you can continue scaling up your continuity solution by protecting additional mailboxes according to your changing requirements—and your budget.

Recovery Almost Immediately

No matter what caused your primary Exchange servers to go down, whether planned or unplanned downtime, the mailboxes you’ve chosen to protect using MailShadow will always be fully recoverable, and always in less than 10 minutes--however long it takes to switch Outlook users to the recovery server. No additional time is required to mount information stores since they’re already up and running.

The RTOs offered by others offer you only assurances about how long it will take to provide access to all the data stored on your recovery servers—corrupt though it may be. Accordingly, you might have to burn additional precious hours (or days) trying to get everything to mount.

Not so with MailShadow, because it uses a unique proprietary transaction-oriented replication approach that assures both higher reliability and an RTO you can actually count on. What’s more, MailShadow provides the shortest Recovery Point Objective (RPO) ensuring no critical data is lost.

How it Works

Here’s how it works in a nutshell.

1. For each protected Outlook® user, MailShadow acquires from Exchange all transactions and transmits them to the corresponding ShadowMailbox on your recovery server.
2. Each of these transactions then is processed on the recovery server just as 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.
3. MailShadow also validates that each transaction is complete and fully formed before transferring it. Which is to say that MailShadow has been specifically designed not to transfer any corrupted transactions—and thus manages to avoid propagating bad data to your recovery Exchange server.

You end up with ShadowMailboxes that are truly on hot standby and ready for service at a moment’s notice.

What makes all of this work are the MailShadow servers that reside at both your primary site and your recovery site. Just one MailShadow server is all that’s necessary to support all of your protected mailboxes at your main location, even if those mailboxes are distributed over many different Exchange servers.

Upon extracting a set of transactions, the MailShadow server works to compact them by

• Packaging them for maximum efficiency
• Ensuring that large properties and attachments are sent only once
• Using compression and encryption to prepare packets for delivery via the WAN

The MailShadow server at the recovery site reverses each of these steps in order to reconstruct transactions that can then be passed along to the recovery Exchange server, where the transactions in turn can be processed. In this way, the recovery Exchange server remains fully ready at all times to carry the mail should a failover occur.

Users Don't Notice a Thing

When something happens to interrupt the Exchange server, your protected Outlook users will hardly notice, apart from being prompted to login again. They’ll be back up and running just as before since their Outlook client will be automatically redirected to the recovery Exchange server.

Transactions will continue queueing at the recovery site MailShadow server until an administrator triggers a failback. In many ways, the recovery MailShadow server then will function just as the primary site MailShadow server normally does—compacting and transmitting queued transactions via the WAN back to the primary site so they can in turn be processed by the Exchange servers there.

Once the queue on the recovery side has been emptied and the Exchange servers on either side have been fully synchronized, all transaction traffic related to protected users can simply be switched back to the primary site. All of which may seem quite simple—but, oh, what a difference it can make to your most important Outlook users (and the company that depends on their continued productivity).

Request a call today and find out how you can use MailShadow to keep your most important users connected, no matter what.