How to plan for Maximum Uptime for Exchange ?

[icintamyself]

Exchange 5.5 running on Windows NT 4.0.
300 Users.

I set up an Exchange server serbing my organisation with 300 users. There is only one site and one server. We installed IMS. It has been running for almost 2 years. On and off, sometimes we experienced some outage such as IMS service failure and corrupted .edb files. With the backup we are able to recover the Exchange server.

However since there is only one Exchange Server, if this server goes down, our users would be deprived from using the email services as per normal. We minimise this problem by setting up another email server that would be kick start whenever the mail Exchange server goes down. This doesn't look professional.

I would like to call for constructive discussion on how could we have redundancy setup for this environment.
Thanks in advance.

 

[chester27]

We have the following in place.
Server with 6 drives. 5 as raid 5 one as a hot spare, 2nd raid controller is in as backup. 3 PSU's in the server all running off seteprate UPS's. Exchange is on Win 2000, and all important services are set to restart if failure occurs, and theses services are monitored by a software package, that pages us upon failure.

 

[icintamyself]

Thanks Chester27 for your reply. Hence you are building a higher reliability capability in your machine. What is the software package used to page you upon failure ?

Other than depending on the reliability of a single machine, is there any other possible way to setup a highly reliable mail systems using Exchange whereby if one server fail, users would still be able to connect to another machine without any message lost. This sound like clustering. If so, is there anybody out there that can tell about his clustering experience ? Otherwise is there possibly any other way that we can build a reliable mail systems with Exchange where when one Exchange machine goes down, the other would quickly take over automatically ?