To Exchange or Not To Exchange – that is the question.
“System Down” due to a power outage is a classic example of a scenario that any IT solutions and products provider would choose to emphasize the benefits of an Exchange server. And yet, most often people would reluctantly agree, thinking that the probability of a power outage of a great magnitude is as low as that of a massive earthquake right where they live! But disasters happen, be they infrastructural or not. What can be done to avoid or minimize the effects of a “System Down” situation, assuming it is real? The case below is real and happened a day ago.
One of the servers that processes emails is located in Dallas, Texas, and a large and very recent power outage caused a system failure. Would the tropical storm that we heard of from the news be responsible for this? No doubt, but what difference does it make? The outage impacted about half of the infrastructure at the facility including some with redundant power (A+B feeds) and two PDUs. The power outage issue was successfully resolved later in the day, however the hardware on reboot failed and a bare metal recovery was required, which took another 15 hours of emergency response. Although it seemed forever, in less than 24 hours, all systems were back up again. Nevertheless, judging by the number of calls we received, it is interesting to see how dependent we all are on email and web commerce and how alone we feel without them .
In conclusion, we won’t say “We told you so”, but keep in mind that with the exchange server in place all emails sent to you are filtered by Electric Mail for Virus and Spam, and are held and forwarded to the exchange server. If the Electric Mail server fails, all data is transferred to another center within minutes, shortage that would go un-noticed.
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