eXchange Protection Wizard for Double-Take

To say that email is a critical application is an obvious understatement. Few applications are more integral to an organisation's day-to-day operation. For many companies, an hour of Exchange downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost productivity.

How can you justify a disaster recovery and high availability solution for Microsoft Exchange that does not provide immediate and up-to-the-second recovery of Exchange data?

Double-Take Software provides organisations with continuous data replication solutions for Exchange disaster recovery, remote availability, and high availability by protecting all changes to Exchange data at the byte level rather than the full file or block level. You get up-to-the-second Exchange data protection with maximum performance and minimal use of your network and system resources. This allows Exchange failover to occur with the latest data available, without the need to run a data restore and recovery routine

Double-Take Application Manager for Exchange integrates the management of application protection into a single console allowing for increased automation and ease of setup, resulting in improved protection, reduced recovery times, and a higher level of application availability.

Data replication solutions for Exchange from Double Take Software can safely protect Exchange data to any location across the city or across the country. By taking advantage of its built-in bandwidth control and extended queuing features, Double-Take can use your current infrastructure to protect your existing Exchange servers to any other location.

The eXchange Protection Wizard is used with DoubleTake to simplify the setup of standard DoubleTake connections to protect an Exchange environment. The XPW discovers all Exchange servers in your environment so that you can determine which servers are not protected. It gathers information about the environment from various sources (including Double-Take, Active Directory, and DNS) and automatically configures Double-Take to protect that environment. It also performs a “health check” to make sure that your configuration is correct. This check not only helps to reduce configuration errors, but it also simplifies the setup process.

The eXchange Protection Toolkit includes the following components:

• eXchange Protection Wizard (XPW) – For one-to-one configurations in standalone Exchange environments, you can use the eXchange Protection Wizard. The XPW provides a workflow-guided user interface that you can use to automate Exchange protection setup. The XPW uses the Exchange Failover utility to make the necessary Active Directory changes to allow the target to stand in for the source, and it uses the DNS Failover utility when DNS failover is selected.
• Exchange Failover utility (EFO) – The Exchange Failover utility allows you to implement manual methods to perform Exchange failover/failback. The Exchange Failover utility can be used in the following situations:
• Source and target machines reside in a parent/child relationship
• Clustered Exchange implementations
• Other configurations that are not compatible with the XPW
• DNS Failover utility (DFO) – The DNS failover utility automatically updates DNS resource records in order to seamlessly redirect network clients. The DFO utility is called by the failover scripts. The DFO utility has its own readme file to document DFO syntax, known issues, and workarounds.