IBM ProtecTier Implementation and Best Practices Guide

286 IBM ProtecTIER Implementation and Best Practices Guide

20.2 Microsoft Exchange

This section describes the recommended settings for the Microsoft Exchange (Exchange)

environment to improve the backup throughput and the factoring ratio of the ProtecTIER

server. The examples used in this section are based on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, but the

recommended settings apply to most enterprise backup applications. Some of the settings

might not be available in other backup applications. Contact the backup application provider

for additional information.

20.2.1 Defragmentation

Defragmentation is commonly used in the Microsoft Exchange environment to recover the

disk efficiency of fragmented disks. The defragmentation process rearranges the data stored

on the disk and creates continuous storage space. There are two types of defragmentation

processes: online defragmentation and offline defragmentation.

Online defragmentation

The online defragmentation process removes objects that are no longer being used while

Exchange databases remain online. Before Microsoft Exchange 2010, the online

defragmentation ran as part of daily Mailbox database maintenance, although this Mailbox

database maintenance could be scheduled to run at different times.

In Exchange 2010, online defragmentation is separated from the Mailbox database

maintenance process and it runs continuously in the background. Additional details about

database defragmentation are available in the topic “New Exchange Core Store Functionality”

at the following website:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125040.aspx#NewESE

Offline defragmentation

Offline defragmentation is a manual process that creates a database file and copies database

records without the white space from the original database file to the newly created database

file. When the defragmentation process is complete, the original database is removed and the

new database file is renamed as the original.

Offline defragmentation is not part of regular Mailbox database maintenance. It can be done

only when the Mailbox database is in an offline state, and this action requires much storage

space, as both the original database file and newly created database file must coexist on the

disk during the defragmentation process.

20.2.2 Recommendations for Microsoft Exchange

Here are the recommended processes and settings of the backup applications to optimize the

performance and factoring ratio of the ProtecTIER server:

򐂰 Perform a daily full backup instead of daily incremental backups where only transaction

logs are backed up.

򐂰 Create one backup job for each database (or for each storage group) without

multistreaming to keep similar data blocks in the same stream.