Lucid8 backs up Exchange databases as new data is added

Lucid8 is a Washington-based company that offers products designed to make Microsoft Exchange run more smoothly and more reliably, focusing on disaster prevention, optimizing Exchange message stores and providing more reliable recovery. The company’s primary product is GOexchange, an offering that optimizes the performance of Exchange databases by diagnosing and repairing errors in them, compacting them for more efficient storage and tuning them for optimal performance. The company has just introduced DigiVault, a tool that provides continuous data protection and recovery capabilities.

In support of DigiVault’s launch, Lucid8 provided some rather frightening statistics – frightening, at least, if your job is tied to the performance of your Exchange environment:

* According to a survey that Lucid8 conducted earlier this year, two-thirds of the organizations surveyed had experienced at least one failure to restore Exchange from back-up tapes.  Nearly one-quarter of the organizations surveyed reported permanent data loss as a result of a system failure.

* Microsoft found that 42% of recoveries that were attempted from traditional tape backup fail.

* According to a survey conducted by Storage Magazine, of those organizations that test their back-up tapes, nearly four out of five fail to restore properly.

In short, tape backup – which most organizations rely upon as their primary means of restoring an e-mail server after a crash – just don’t work very well and are not a sufficiently reliable means of protecting against data loss.

Lucid8’s DigiVault, on the other hand, is a disk-based system that backs up information from Exchange databases each time new data is added to the databases.  Restoration of an Exchange server can be accomplished easily from any point in time, resulting in more reliable backups and restoration of data that is much more recent than is possible with traditional backups. DigiVault offers 256-bit encryption of data during both transmission and storage, such as in an off-site facility.

For those charged with managing an Exchange environment, GOexchange and DigiVault are worth a serious look.