Overview

Over the last several years, as I have met with organizations deploying Exchange Server, one fundamental concept continues to be driven home to me. It may seem obvious to some of you, but proactive management is one of the most important yet underutilized techniques for increasing system availability. This point was illustrated by one organization that I have dealt with quite often. This organization was facing severe pressures from senior management and their client base because of unacceptable levels of downtime for the Exchange deployment. This organization's cause of downtime was not hardware or environment; it was the result of frequent Exchange information store corruption. Since it was impossible to solve this issue and guarantee that it would never occur again, the organization chose to overcome the problem through proactive management practices. By simply deploying a management application that was Exchange-aware and by putting in place some problem notification, tracking, and resolution/response procedures, they were able to significantly reduce the user impact of this issue. In the short term, the number of occurrences did not significantly change (although Microsoft and the hardware vendor diligently continued to work the issue). However, the system management staff's alerting, notification, and procedures for handling the issue did change. Instead of reacting to an occurrence of database corruption (which caused several hours of downtime), support staff was immediately alerted to the condition and was able to immediately move mailboxes from the server experiencing the error to a spare standby server. This served to minimize...