Designed to Conserve Bandwidth

One thing to remember when evaluating DR solutions is that there are costs to account for far beyond the price of the solution itself. Among other things, you need to take a long hard look at what the impact is likely to be on the WAN responsible for linking your primary site to your recovery site. Buy a solution that makes inefficient use of the bandwidth available to you there and you’ll keep on paying for it day after day after day for years to come.

90% Reduction in WAN Traffic

MailShadow® was designed specifically to minimize the demands placed on WANs. For starters MailShadow allows you to replicate just a subset of your organization’s mailboxes. But then MailShadow further extends that advantage by transmitting only the transaction data that’s related to that subset of mailboxes over to your recovery site. The resulting bandwidth load typically represents only about 10 percent of what one of those traditional solutions would routinely throw at your WAN.

And just on the basis of that—a 90 percent reduction in WAN traffic—there’s a very good chance that MailShadow will more than pay for itself over time.

Transmit Transactions Once

MailShadow has also been designed to transmit transactions only once, whereas traditional file replication schemes end up sending the same data multiple times—twice at minimum since transactions are written initially to .log files and then processed to .edb files.

And, depending on how your Exchange housekeeping gets handled, things could get worse. For example, if you have a policy that limits the number of days that email can be stored on your Exchange servers, some file replication solutions are left with no choice but to replicate the whole .edb file once the time comes for the day’s email activity to be either purged or archived.

MailShadow instead simply processes the appropriate deletions—which is easier, quicker and generates a whole lot less of a load for your WAN. Users of traditional replication solutions, by contrast, get soundly punished for having implemented an otherwise sound administrative policy.

Worse still are the block-level replication solutions where something as mundane as file defragmentation can end up triggering monstrously huge transmissions to your recovery servers. In fact, bandwidth utilization by these block-level solutions tends to be so inefficient that you actually would be well advised to limit their use to LAN environments—unless, of course, you just happen to have a super-abundant amount of free WAN bandwidth available to you.

MailShadow’s proprietary transport protocol also uses buffering, packet recombination and compression to ensure high throughput even over high-latency lines.

Request a call today and learn how you can limit the impact on your WAN using MailShadow.