Email Continuity

Email Availability Requirement
Email is an integral part of conducting business today. With the increasing importance of email, even the slightest disruption in service can have significant financial impact on a business. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2007, 75% of Global 2000 companies will have emergency systems for employee communication as part of disaster recovery plans in the event of a crisis. As a mission critical part of an organization's communication infrastructure, contingency planning and disaster recovery for email systems must be a standard requirement rather than an afterthought.

Integrated Mirapoint Disaster Recovery Solutions
The cost of a disaster recovery system is essentially a function of three variables: the types of problems against which you are insuring, the amount of acceptable data lost and the amount of acceptable time it takes to restore services and data. The more data which must be backed up and the more quickly it must be restored, the more expensive the disaster recovery solution will be. Regardless of your organization's size or backup requirements, Mirapoint has an email disaster recovery solution that will meet your needs. Mirapoint appliances support everything from backup of individual messages up to hot standby installations, making your disaster recovery planning that much easier.

Backup and Restore
Loss of all or part of an email store is obviously a critical event. Taking periodic “snapshots” of the email store (“cold backups”) along with incremental backups (i.e. recording just the changes from the last backup) is the most effective way to keep a relatively up-to-date backup of your email system. Sending these backup images to a remote and secure facility accompanied by an SLA (Service Level Agreement) on the return of data generally guarantees that email data will always be backed up and in a secure location ready for when disaster strikes. This solution is inexpensive and appropriate for the majority of organizations. Mirapoint appliances support cold and incremental backups of their email stores. Mirapoint's support for NDMP backup solutions, with their “history” interface, makes restoring even a single mail folder very easy.

Spare Appliance
Hardware failure is probably one of the ultimate emergencies in the data center. Not only could data be lost, but often the machine itself must be replaced before that server's work can continue. Mirapoint appliances are designed for fault tolerance, using RAID 10 disks with a hot-swappable spare, ECC self-correcting RAM memory, multiple power supplies and battery-backed RAID controllers. And because Mirapoint's products are appliances, complete with application, platform and hardware, they can be quickly and easily replaced with spares. If there is no damage to the disk(s), the drives from the original appliance can be installed into the replacement, minimizing data loss as well as down time.

Failover Systems
Loss of access to a live email store is another critical event. Even if the email store continues to function, loss of a server that accesses that store can slow or cripple email users. Mirapoint supports N+1 failover systems which contain a standby server that monitors up to nine servers in a cluster that access SAN storage. Should one of those active servers fail, the standby server takes over the role of the failed server. This enables continuous access to your SAN storage, with minimal effect on users.

Remote Site Replication
Enterprises that cannot tolerate even short email downtimes - such as many financial, healthcare or government organizations - may need an off-site replicated email server that is synchronized with (“shadows”) the data on the local Message Server. This “hot backup” solution can limit data loss to less than four hours. Should a disaster occur, less than an hour is required to restore users' access to email data. In order to meet the stringent needs of customers requiring such a solution, Mirapoint can provide wide area replication of Mirapoint Message Servers..

Figure 1 - Remote Site Replication

Incidents to Consider
Loss of email data can result from something as simple as the accidental deletion of individual messages to the physical destruction of a datacenter through natural or manmade hardware or software failures disasters. Mirapoint disaster recovery solutions can be customized to your organiziations recovery requirements.

Case Study of a Customer Solution
CHALLENGE:
The customer, a Fortune 200 diversified manufacturing company with 700 decentralized business units in 48 countries, which employ nearly 50,000 employees worldwide, needed a disaster recovery solution they could depend on. Reliability and low TCO were the driving factors in their decision.

SOLUTION:
Mirapoint deployed a secondary email system at a remote site and implemented a remote site replication mechanism, which was then tuned to meet specific customer requirements and constraints.

Network availability, service level requirements, people and processes were analyzed and taken into account in designing the ideal solution.

The replication software guarantees that a viable replica site is available at any time in the face of failure of the master, even in the potentially disastrous case in which all contact with the master site is lost during a synchronization event.

RESULT:
The operating cost of the disaster recovery infrastructure is optimized to fit the needs of the organization. They have a recovery solution that can be immediately activated upon a disaster.

Figure 2 - Custom Solution Example

Integrated Mirapoint Disaster Recovery Solution
The cost of a disaster recovery system is essentially a function of two variables: the amount of data lost and the amount of time it takes to restore saved data. The more data which must be backed up and the quicker it must be restored the more expensive the disaster recovery solution will be. Regardless of your organization’s size or backup requirements, Mirapoint has an email disaster recovery solution that will meet your needs. Mirapoint appliances support everything from backup of individual messages up to hot standby installations, making your disaster recovery planning that much easier.

Mirapoint’s RazorGate is an award-winning security appliance that incorporates everything you need to ensure the safety of your network - all in a single, set-it-and-forget-it device. It blocks spam, protects against viruses and hacker attacks, and filters content for both inbound and outbound messages. It is the only stateless message transfer agent in the industry, eliminating local disk requirements and thus preventing email loss, even in case of failure.

Mirapoint’s Message Server showcases the advantages of the appliance model. With Message Server, all the patches, service packs and upgrade decisions that plague other approaches simply go away. The Mirapoint Message Server supports Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) for dependable data backup and storage with no single points of failure. In fact, the Mirapoint Message Server has proven 99.999% availability, based on the actual monitoring of hundreds of deployed Mirapoint systems. Many Mirapoint customers state that their Message Servers have simply never gone down. But eliminating pain is only part of the Message Server story. The Mirapoint Message Server also:

• Scales to millions of users in a single network with centralized administration and management
• Provides a feature rich web-based client and support for Outlook and mobile clients
• Has the industry's lowest TCO and server consolidation advantages
• Employs a hardened operating system that has no known exploits

Customer Testimonials

“We found Mirapoint's dedicated email servers to be more cost-effective by a three-to-one margin." Gary Anton, Vice President of Strategic Sourcing at Illinois Tool Works.”
Illinois Tool Works

To learn more or to request a free evaluation, call us at (800)937-8118 or email info@mirapoint.com.