More Exchange Data Protection – Beyond Replication

• 06/04/2010
• 2 minutes to read

So far there have been some great comments and questions in response to the first couple of blogs.  In the last written entry I responded to one of the comments.  In the new video I recorded with Ann Vu, she gives voice to a few of the other great questions that have come through.  The core of these questions was basically:  Is replication really a complete solution to all data protection and retention needs?  The answer is of course no. 

Most of the conversation is about the suite of investments that we have brought together that guarantee that the data customers have is fully protected against hardware, infrastructure, human error and logical corruption. 

There is also follow on question that can be interpreted as:  Really?  SQL still uses backup! I wanted to extend that discussion a little and stress a couple of things. 

1)  There are many applications built on SQL that use replication and log shipping from SQL as the core of their data protection strategy just like Exchange does.

2)  At the core I think these questions are about developing trust.  So one obvious test is the degree to which we are “eating our own Dogfood” to use an Exchange colloquialism.  The fact that Microsoft's entire corporate deployment is based on a replication strategy is a strong answer – in that case we are  risking the productivity of over 90,000 employees plus our contractors across the company.  One of the easiest decisions was whether we should use backups as our data protection strategy.  I hope it is pretty clear what we did there.

Perry