Dual back-end exchange servers?

[irbk]

Yesterday my Exchange server died. Something got corrupt with the Exchange database. We were able to restore the database from a last known good backup and then roll forward the transaction logs to bring the server back up and running with no data loss yet being reported.
Our total downtime came to about 17 hours and management would like to know how we could minimize downtime in the future.
We run Exchange in a single (Exchange server) environment and I'm wondering if we set up a 2nd Exchange server, could this down time had been eliminated? I'm not familar enough with running Exchange in a multiple server environment to know if we had more then 1 exchange server, if the database getting corrupted on 1 server would have taken down the 2nd server as well or if the 2nd server would have been able to take over or if there would have been something inbetween that happened.

Thanks in advance.

 

[irbk]

It just dawned on me, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only way this would have been prevented is to have 3 servers running exchange.
1 front end server that the clients connect to
2 back end servers that host the database.

If 1 of the back end servers gets a hosed database, the 2nd back end server would just take over.

Am I correct?

 

[58sniper]

Exchange 2003 clusters still use a single copy of the databases between the nodes. If the data gets corrupted, it doesn't matter which node is active - it's corrupted.

Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[irbk]

Oh, so even if we did have multiple servers, we would still be hosed.

Ok. Thanks! I didn't know if that would be the case or not.

 

[zbnet]

One way of minimising the downtime when you lose a database is with what's known as a dialtone restore.

A good overview is available here:

http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com/2005/11/dialtone-restoresthe-recovery-storage.html

 

[danarf1]

You could use a product like Teneros.

http://www.teneros.com

Its a hot failover stand by exchange appliance and it replicates at the object level not the bit level so the corruption issue goes away.

 

[danarf1]

Sorry forgot to add we use them and have been very happy. Let me know if you want our local guys info