* MessageOne’s OneSwitch for Exchange
Uptime of 99.9% for an e-mail system sounds pretty good until you realize that the corresponding 0.1% of downtime translates into 8 hours 46 minutes of downtime each year (assuming a 24/7 operation), or about 44 minutes of downtime every month. And most organizations don’t experience even 99.9% uptime.
To help organizations that use Microsoft Exchange to maintain e-mail system uptime, MessageOne recently introduced OneSwitch for Exchange, a rapid-failover system designed to bring Exchange back online within 15 minutes after it fails.
To use OneSwitch, an organization must have a back-up Exchange environment either locally or at a remote site. When the primary system fails, OneSwitch handles all of the failover processes necessary to bring the secondary system online and completely restore e-mail service, including the Active Directory system, domain name system and other capabilities. Restoration of service occurs quickly because OneSwitch provides continuous replication and snapshots of the message store to the secondary Exchange environment so that the back-up system is up to date if and when it is needed. OneSwitch also looks for problems in the primary system as a preventive measure and provides up to 72 hours of archiving capability for purposes of disaster recovery.
OneSwitch provides information on system health using a console that looks like it was created by a game designer, using a radar metaphor and the like. Using information provided in this console, an administrator can monitor the health of an Exchange system and initiate the failover process with a single command.
Products like OneSwitch are extremely useful because they do two things: first, they provide useful information on the health of an Exchange environment, making administrators more proactive about maintaining system uptime in a messaging environment. Second, they allow administrators to get as close as possible to 100% uptime. Given that messaging is as critical as plumbing or electricity to many organizations, anything that increases messaging availability is important to understand.
