Professional Windows® PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1

Working with

Continuous Replication

Many companies have grown to recognize email as a business - critical application. Also, messaging

platforms have integrated into areas such as Unified Messaging and workflow processes. New

ways to access mail and documents through mobile phones and VPNs make user access 24x7x365.

Because of this reliance on these services, companies need to make Exchange available without

interruption. It is no longer acceptable to take a service offline — even for maintenance. In

response to customer needs, Microsoft designed Exchange to work in a Windows cluster. In this

configuration, Exchange is fault tolerant to hardware failure by sharing a single copy of the

database and log files. This solution also provides the benefit for administrators to minimize

downtime due to regular server maintenance, such as applying security updates.

However, in recent years, catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina and the World Trade Center

bombing in 1993 and terrorist attacks on 9/11 forced companies to think about site resiliency. In

Exchange 2003 and earlier, organizations that wanted geographical fault tolerance needed to turn

to third parties to provide data replication. A typical scenario in Exchange 2003 was an Exchange

cluster attached to a SAN for hardware/software replication of Exchange data to a second SAN.

This solution could ...