Backup & Archiving Community Blog

All backup jobs have some performance impact on the system that is being backed up. We have been living with such phrases as “The Shrinking Backup Window” for this very reason – and for years. Inevitably, for the period of time that a system is being backed up, the hard drive is busy reading files in order to carry out the backup. You usually have to run this type of process when it is less likely to impact the...

Within our organisation we are solely concerned with email archiving. We have six Exchange 2000 active/passive clusters, with a dedicated EV server attached to each split equally across two data centres.

Before our virtualisation adventure took place we were running our EV email archiving servers on end of life hardware (End of life when the project implemented EV), which with ever increasing frequency of hardware failures took place. Typically mirrored disks would go down, raid card battery failures, RSA cards not functioning, the list goes on. It was just one big headache; and that was only the hardware.

For the software we were running on 2007 7.5 SP1, which seemed to give us no end of users complaining about their emails not completely archiving and their mailboxes not decreasing in size. We were also running on Windows 2003 SP1; which Symantec had advised us several times has serious shortcomings with MSMQs. Essentially the outgoing queues did not get processed...