Overview

As I charge down the path of building a mission-critical Exchange deployment, it wouldn't be prudent to start without a discussion and investigation into downtime and outages for Exchange Server. If your messaging system has become mission-critical, the cost of downtime can be devastating to an organization. These costs can come in the form of lost revenue, lost opportunity, failed service-level agreements (SLAs), and/or noncompliance/performance penalties. This does not even consider the fixed costs that an organization must pay whether its employees are working or not. What can be the most damaging are the losses that are incalculable such as the loss of customer relationships or satisfaction. When your customers and business partners are affected by an outage in your messaging system, they may perceive a poorly run organization that they are not excited to do business with. As a result, our discussions around outage and downtime should begin in the business context. In other words, what does downtime of your Exchange deployment cost the company? The higher the costs, the more dollars are justified for deploying high availability measures and investing in personnel and procedures. The more successful an organization is in delivering the levels of reliability required, the faster a return on investment can be realized.

In this chapter, we will look at the enemy of mission-critical systems downtime. It is important that we have a consensus on how downtime is to be measured and the affect this will have on how the Exchange deployment is viewed by...