Paul Robichaux on Geoclustering

Paul Robichaux commented on Geoclustering in last week's edition of the Exchange and Outlook Update. He points out that it can be quite expensive, but that it can also be a very good (and this is key: Supported/Tested) way to span your Exchange servers across multiple sites to prepare for disaster avoidance.

There was some discussion in the comments area of a previous message on this blog about some alternate ways to do “hotspare”-type disaster recovery environments as a method of avoiding the costs and limitations of geospan clustering. There's still some internal investigations going on about just what non-standard sorts of recovery environments can be supported by Microsoft PSS, so that comment thread isn't really totally dead yet, I suppose.

That said, I'm curious to hear from you in the comments: What sort of geo-clustering or clustered-Exchange disaster-recovery concerns do you have that affect your planning of these scenarios?

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 12, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  May 18, 2004
  We are looking into this as we speak. We need to provide site redundancy for 50,000 mailboxes. We're an EMC customer with SRDF already in place for a database application so this is technology we know. Our concern is the additional I/O latency imposed by a synchronous replication mechanism. We will be testing this in the coming months to see how viable this solution can be.
  
  Mike