Exchange 2010 Single Item Recovery

Today, again, a customer went away from a call feeling that the people they had been speaking to previously were doing a smoke-and-mirrors job on them. The topic in question was single item recovery in Exchange 2010 (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/25/452632.aspx) and the ability for individual users to get their hands on retained mail and what implementing the feature means for your servers. Taken at its simplest:

Implement SIR and your store sizes increase. Implement SIR and, because the storage isn't in an 'archived' state, the server resources are commensurately higher. Either you need more servers or you need more stores or you need more disk. Implement SIR and the users still cannot do their own restores. They need assistance from IT services staff and that means staff beyond first line 'ticket crew' type people. Implement SIR and you have significantly more storage to cope* with. Larger/more stores and maybe online background maintenance 24/7 means more IOPS. To summarize, implement SIR and the already problematic Exchange 2010 DAG storage efficiency takes another hefty knock.

As usual there's an alternative. Snapshots are here to help you. If you keep your primary site copies nice and minimal - and you've seen how deduplication helps a lot there - you can replicate nice, small (relatively speaking!) databases to your secondary site and retain long term snapshots at that location. Using far less storage allows for store-size recoveries to be carried out quickly but that's the secondary result. Using the money saved on your storage you can re-invest a small part of it towards a single item recovery tool that can connect to your snapshots and drag single messages, folders or mailboxes back from what was previously considered to be oblivion.

Ohhh, I can hear it now. OMGOMGOMG, more software. Money. Spend. Microsoft gets me that for free. I think I've explained above that it's far from free so go re-read what I just typed, just to make sure. Once you've done that you then take a look at the soft costs. If my front office team are using a GUI to do single restores it's instantly down-skilled so you are going to employ fewer 3rd line admins, need fewer people at your outsourcing organization leveraged to you or alternatively you can increase your technology offerings to the business. The cost of the products and support is a tenth to a fifth of the annual cost of an admin so you've hit ROI inside three months and reduced the time a case is open by an order of magnitude.

So implementing snapshots isn't just about being able to restore a store that, frankly, is probably never going to be necessary. What snapshots mean to you is flexibility; Efficient and reduced storage footprints. The option to down-skill mundane tasks. There is nothing that anyone can come up with that does not lead you away from the fact that snapshots make business sense. The cool technical stuff is just the sauce base on which the good stuff sits.

Go for it, bother your local NetApp rep. Tell him the wastrel from Philly sent ya!

*Note "cope" does not necessarily mean backup/restore; it simply means cope with, as in monitor, maintain, look-after.