Managing Microsoft Exchange Server has never been easy and Exchange 2010 introduces a few new twists even as Microsoft promises to ease some of the management burden. Granted, Microsoft did make some notable changes to 2010 in regards to improving its availability, remote management and performance characteristics that addressed key end-user concerns. But these changes mean Exchange administrators need to pay special attention as to how they manage the Exchange data store going forward as Microsoft chose to sacrifice Single Instance Store (SIS) to deliver on these new user demands.
The changes that Microsoft made to its recently released Exchange Server 2010 largely reflect what its end-users most wanted to see improved. So it is no surprise that Microsoft gave considerable attention to shoring up Exchange’s high availability and performance features given Exchange’s mission critical nature in many organizations today. But to improve these two features, Microsoft chose to eliminate SIS and, in so doing, change how administrators need to manage its data stores going forward.
SIS was used in prior versions of Exchange to minimize the size of the Exchange data. It kept the first copy of a message and indexed other copies before discarding them. This was done to optimize Exchange’s performance as well as minimize storage capacity.
Microsoft’s move away from SIS in Exchange 2010 was done solely to improve performance. Tony Redmond, in an April 2009 Windows IT Pro article, explains that with Exchange 2010 the header data for all mailbox items is stored in a single database.
This makes the database more efficient since it only needs to process a single table during a client session instead of having to access different tables from different mailbox folders. But to accomplish this, SIS was abandoned. Redmond says, “Most servers support multiple databases, so the efficiency gained from SIS is less and less as time goes on.”
This decision to abandon will not likely negatively impact administrators during their initial setup and implementation of Exchange 2010. Rather its impact will be more directly felt by administrators over time as they are managing the Exchange 2010 data stores in the following two ways:
- First, the initial performance gains that Exchange 2010 achieves by abandoning SIS can be negated as the size of the Exchange data store grows even though Exchange 2010 now uses multiple data stores. As each data store increases in size, the performance of Exchange will begin to degrade, backup and restore times will lengthen and more storage capacity will be needed.
- Second, old and new versions of Exchange are incompatible. Because Microsoft changed the schema of the Exchange database, organizations should not expect to be able to restore email messages from backups of previous versions of Exchange directly into an Exchange 2010 mailbox. In some cases, organizations may even first have to recover an entire instance of the prior version of Exchange before its email message can be accessed and copied to the Exchange 2010 mailbox.
It is these more subtle Exchange 2010 management gotchas that administrators need to be prepared to address as they go forward. The trick is for administrators to select software that will tackle both of these two issues.
It should be clear that Microsoft’s decision to abandon SIS in Exchange 2010 makes it almost imperative for administrators to adopt email archiving software. But it is also likely, especially among those organizations upgrading from Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, they will have to be prepared to access and recover email messages from older Exchange data stores to Exchange 2010.
This is a task that, to the best of my knowledge, only CommVault® Simpana® Archive for Microsoft Exchange can accomplish on both levels. Due to CommVault’s deep integration with Microsoft’s products, not only can it archive the data on individual Exchange data stores to keep the size of each of its data stores trimmed down it size, it can directly recover message from prior versions of Exchange directly into Exchange 2010. Further, using CommVault Simpana for backup and recovery, it can even go the other way and recover messages from Exchange 2010 into prior versions to accommodate those organizations that may be running multiple versions of Exchange.
The enhancements to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 address immediate organizational concerns about its availability and performance. But Microsoft’s decision to abandon SIS and change the schema of the Exchange database potentially left organizations exposed later on both in terms of controlling their data growth within Exchange as well as making the recovery of messages very difficult to accomplish.
It is only by deploying data management software such as CommVault Simpana and its complementary backup and email archiving software in conjunction with their deployment of Exchange that they can mitigate these issues. In so doing, organizations can keep their new Exchange 2010 data stores fit and trim without having to expend extraordinary efforts and time trying to recover messages from prior versions of Exchange.