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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 32
The remaining portion of data to be restored, elapsed between T8 and T9, should be protected by an
integrated backup solution as explained at the beginning of Section 7. This would take the same
amount of time to be recovered in either approach (incremental backup or Smart Copy snapshot).
7.3 Testing Brick level recovery
In addition to performing in-place recovery of the Exchange databases, EqualLogic Smart Copy
snapshots can be mounted as recovery databases to perform granular or brick level recovery. The goal
of this test was to establish the time required to use a Smart Copy snapshot as an optional source of
granular restore capability for user mailboxes or leaf objects (folders). The scenario addresses a real
world situation where an Exchange administrator has reduced or disabled the quotas for the
recoverable items feature, for example, to reduce the size of the database, to remove self-recover
abilities from users, or for legal compliance. In these cases, the administrator can take advantage of
snapshots to enable brick level recovery (at an administrative level only).
Test Details for the Recovery Database restore and setup:
Details Restore of one database, automatic configuration of a recovery database (or
RDB)
Key indicator Time taken for restore
The tasks undertaken by ASM/ME are reported below:
1. Turn the Smart Copy online and present it to the host, on the mount point specified
interactively
2. Automatic setup of an RDB pointing to the restored Smart Copy snapshot
3. Mount of the recovered mailbox database
Once again the outcomes of these operations were tracked in the Application Event Log of the
mailbox database server (
MSExchangeIS Mailbox Store and ESE engine). The host local resources were
not impacted at all.
Table 7 reports the time taken to restore the Smart Copy snapshot and setup/mount the Exchange
RDB.
Table 7 Brick level recovery, time taken
Operation
Task
Duration
Next steps
ASM automated RDB
RDB removal
20 sec (if present)
Administrator access
Snapshot restore
25 sec
RDB setup
387sec
Total (end-to-end restore) = 412 sec
or 432sec (in case of RDB already present and to be removed)
When an RDB is mounted, it is available for administrative access only with limited protocols and at the
command line exclusively. After the recovery database has been mounted, the time taken to recover
any leaf object is dependent of type of object being recovered and hence is variable as per your