CA XOsoft™ High Availability Option for Exchange (formerly CA XOsoft WANSyncHA Exchange)
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange is a business continuity solution based on asynchronous real-time replication and automated application failover and failback to provide cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery for Microsoft Exchange on both 32- and 64 bit Windows servers, as well as MSCS clusters.
CA XOsoft High Availability offers push-button or fully automatic failover of mission-critical email servers over a LAN or WAN, Exchange-aware status monitoring, integrated continuous data protection as a guard against data corruption, and completely non-disruptive automatic testing of your Exchange disaster recovery system. All our products are designed for ease of configuration and management.
Communication is the heart of any organization and Exchange has become a central part of the modern business infrastructure for communication and collaboration both internally and with customers and partners. If disaster should strike, whether in the form of a hurricane, a blackout, or far more likely, a virus attack or software or user error, your ability to respond well to the crisis can make the difference between a bright future and the end of your business. At the very least, you are likely to incur significant costs in lost business and, perhaps more importantly, lost confidence by your customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Exchange disaster recovery is not just about insurance. It is about maintaining your relationships and sustaining your competitive edge.
CA XOsoft High Availability is designed to give you that edge.
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange, a solution that offers True Business Continuity
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange is a business continuity solution that integrates several technologies to provide continuous availability of your mission-critical application servers through a wide range of disruptions — from server failure to data corruption to the loss of an entire site.
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange provides:
- Asynchronous host-based software MS Exchange replication that transfers changes to Exchange data as they occur to a standby replica server located locally or over the WAN
- Automatic monitoring of your production Exchange application, including both server availability and the state of Exchange services and data
- Push-button or auto-triggered automatic failover of all users to a standby server, which may be on the same network or across a WAN at an arbitrarily distant site
- Automatic configuration of Exchange on your standby replica server to match your production server configuration
- Push-button or automatic failover back to the original server when ready
- Integrated continuous data protection (CDP) for recovery from data corrupted by virus action or user or application error
- A CDP Repository with full text searching capability give end users control to recover important data quickly without placing the burden on IT administrators
- With the New Centralized Manager you have greater operational control by allowing you to manage all your replication/failover scenario configurations for your entire environment from a single console
- Bandwidth benchmarking assessment mode allows you to estimate bandwidth requirements prior to the deployment of any replication scenario. This gives you greater cost control by knowing exactly what your requirements are so that you can purchase only the bandwidth you need to meet your business needs
- Unique ease of installation with no application or user downtime, automated remote installation, and wizard-driven creation of new Exchange high availability scenarios
Download the Real-Time High Availability For Exchange Essential Guide
In addition, for compliance and testing purposes, CA XOsoft Assured Recovery works in conjunction with the CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange solution to support full testing of the recoverability of your application and data on the Exchange disaster recovery replica system. Testing is done by actually starting up application services on the replica and performing whatever operations are required to verify the integrity of the data, including updates to the database, without any disruption to or gap in protection of the production system.
Other Resources
Learn more about our Exchange high availability solution by downloading a trial evaluation of the production version of our software. Our white paper Business and IT Requirements for High Availability, will help to complete your Exchange disaster recovery research.
Read about the 5 key principles that guide the design of CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange and all of CA XOsoft's products.
Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our Exchange high availability automatic failover solution.
Be sure to contact us for information related to your specific MS Exchange replication and high availability needs.
Because the environments are not recommended by Microsoft, CA XOsoft does not support CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange in an environment where either the master or replica server is also functioning as a Windows Domain Controller. In addition we do not support CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange in an environment where the master server is running Microsoft Small Business Server. If you do require support for these environments, our flagship product, WANSync (does not include automated failover) will provide this support. Please click here for more specific technical details about this issue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Need high availability for BlackBerry Enterprise Server?
Check out our BlackBerry High Availability solution page for a customized BlackBerry automated monitoring and failover solution.
The CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange Advantage
The CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange delivers significant benefits that enable reduced cost and complexity, significantly broader and deeper protection against a wide variety of potential disruptions, and support that allows your business to become much more proactive in handling both crisis situations and planned downtime. Major benefits of CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange include:
Broader Exchange Disaster Recovery Protection for Reduced Vulnerability
Effective protection is not about having a single technology, but about layering solutions to provide protection against the full range of types of failures. CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange high availability works with the other critical components of your business continuity system, like clustering, backup and snapshot technologies, and then itself adds several key technologies to address a broad range of potential threats. Remember: anything that keeps your business from doing what it does is a disaster, whether that is a flood, virus, or bug in your server software. CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange high availability enhances your capacity to respond, and therefore your ability to provide continuous, reliable service to your customers.
- Automatic failover across LAN or WAN protects against storage failure on a cluster or standalone system as well as loss of an entire site
- "Soft" installation allows software to be deployed without server reboots or application service restarts — which means no downtime is required to deploy the solution
- Real-time MS Exchange replication minimizes potential data loss
- Integrated continuous data protection (CDP) ensures recovery even when data becomes corrupted
- Exchange-specific monitoring ensures that failures are detected quickly, allowing you to respond quickly
- Increased Productivity: Exchange High Availability Automatic Failover and Auto-Configuration
Increased Productivity: Exchange High Availability Automatic Failover and Auto-Configuration
In the end, the purpose of a business continuity solution is productivity: to ensure that your people and your business are able to continue operating during and after a disaster. CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange ensures this through consistent use of automation throughout the operation of the product, increasing the productivity of your system administrator through ease of configuration and management and of your users through decreased application downtime.
- Fully automatic failover or user triggered, single-click failover reduce the time that users are unable to work
- Fully automated push-button failback when your production system is ready avoids cumbersome reconfiguration and additional downtime
- Auto-discovery of Exchange components and auto-configuration of appropriate settings means minimal administrator time to configure your high availability solution
- Automatic configuration of your replica Exchange server to match your production configuration significantly reduces error-prone and tedious setup tasks
- Intuitive GUI for central management of all business continuity scenarios maximizes administrator productivity
- Support for scenario templates and support for configuration changes to multiple scenarios at once increase productivity and reduce errors
- Together with CA XOsoft Assured Recovery, fully automated testing requires no administrator intervention and has no user impact, while maintaining Exchange disaster recovery protection at all times
- Remote installation wizard and zero-downtime installation minimize demands on IT staff and impact on users
True Exchange Disaster Recovery with Reduced Complexity and Cost
It is important that the expense in money and time of purchasing, installing and managing your MS Exchange replication and Exchange high availability solution be commensurate with the potential cost that you are protecting against. Some systems truly require the tremendous expense and complexity of the very highest-end high availability solutions, but most applications can trade a few extra seconds during an automatic failover for dramatically reduced up front and total costs.
- Protection tailored to the subtleties of the Exchange environment simplifies setup for dramatically reduced time to deploy
- Hardware and platform-independent software approach provides an effective Exchange high availability solution at significantly lower cost
- Exchange-aware automation and intuitive interface reduce administrator time for lower TCO
- Real-time asynchronous MS Exchange replication offers continuous protection over cost-effective networks
- Single point of management and monitoring reduces management complexity.
- Clear scenario status indicators and multiple alert paths ensure that issues requiring action are identified quickly
- Support for scenario templates and support for configuration changes to multiple scenarios at once increase productivity and reduce errors
- Has no hidden costs - does not require advanced OS editions or third-party clustering solutions
- Combined with CA XOsoft Assured Recovery, allows zero-impact, fully automated testing of your Exchange disaster recovery system
- Easily combines with virtual server technologies for reduced cost and complexity
(see our solution paper Consolidation of Disaster Recovery Replica Servers: WANSync and Virtual Server Technologies)
- Scheduled bandwidth throttling reduces impact on production environment
Increased Flexibility to Fit Your Needs and Environment
The CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange solution is designed to be an out-of-the-box solution for realistic environments, but also provides support for you to customize to fit your needs.
Extending CA XOsoft High Availability to New Exchange-Based Applications
To support all these capabilities, CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange must support the ability to monitor Exchange services, to start and stop services during failover or failback, to check which server is currently active and which passive, and to redirect users from one server to another. For Exchange, all of these capabilities are built into the product and available out-of-the-box. In addition, however, for every single one of them it is possible to register a user-defined script which can replace or augment the default actions.
Why? Because many applications are built on top of infrastructure applications like Microsoft Exchange. An excellent example of this is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which links with two Microsoft products: Exchange to provide the underlying email infrastructure, and SQL to store all BlackBerry data. By properly configuring the master and replica servers and registering just four simple scripts you have a tailored high availability solution for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Exchange Disaster Recovery — How Much Availability is Enough?
The ability of a business to cope with disasters has always been important. As the use of messaging and collaboration technology to fuel business processes has grown, so too have the needs for collateral technologies to ensure that the Exchange data and services that underlie these processes can be brought back online within a reasonable time.
What has changed, however, is the amount of downtime that modern businesses can tolerate and the extent to which their processes depend critically on IT infrastructure support. No longer is it sufficient for most business to be up again within a few days or even a few hours. And no longer is last night's backup sufficient. Many businesses today need to be able to switch to backup systems within minutes and to keep data losses to within just the emails in process at the time of failure.
That is the kind of Exchange high availability solution that CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange provides.
When disaster strikes and critical Exchange servers go down, just having backups or standby replica servers may not be enough. What is needed is the capacity for rapid and automatic failover to servers that have up-to-the-minute mailbox data so that users can just keep working.
View our 20 minute Exchange high availability demo.
Exchange High Availability for Critical Applications
The CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange solution for business continuity with MS Exchange replication and automatic failover ensures that, should a critical Exchange server become unavailable - due to failure or maintenance-related downtime - a replica will immediately provide service in its place without the need for time-consuming manual procedures or, even worse, reconfiguration of client machines. Easy to say, but any administrator who has had to carry such a procedure out for a modern application server well knows that it is not easy to do.
CA XOsoft High Availability provides a tailored, out-of-the-box automatic failover solution for critical industry-standard applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle databases, IIS for Microsoft web servers, and File Server for tailored file server support as well as customizable protection for other application servers.
Review the NetworkWorld's high availability product comparison to see how CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange compares to competitive products.
To protect your business from the costs of both unplanned and planned downtime, read our white papers, The Essential Guide to Planned and Unplanned Downtime and Best practice: Simultaneously upgrade your Exchange and disaster recovery protection.
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange — an Exchange Disaster Recovery Solution with Automatic Failover
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange advances from the CA XOsoft Replication platform for host-based asynchronous replication over LAN or WAN, but extends it to provide a true high availability solution with Exchange-aware monitoring and automatic failover, even across IP networks.
CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange builds on CA XOsoft Replication's ability to maintain standby replicas of complete Exchange servers. These synchronized servers may be local to the organization, but may also be maintained remotely, with real-time MS Exchange replication over the WAN ensuring that the information on the standby servers is only seconds behind the production system. Should a server fall prey to unexpected failure or be brought down for maintenance, a synchronized replica, regardless of where it is located in the world, can automatically and instantaneously be brought on-line to maintain high availability, with no need for laborious manual procedures.
Failover may be triggered automatically, or CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange can be configured to alert the appropriate administrator who can trigger an automated failover with a simple push of a button. When the production server is available again, failback is equally simple — a push of a button. The entire process takes only a few minutes — at most the time required to stop and start application services on the servers involved.
Need high availability for BlackBerry Enterprise Server?
Check out our BlackBerry High Availability solution page for a customized BlackBerry automated monitoring and failover solution.
You can find more detailed technical information on CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange and the architectures that support it in our accompanying advanced discussion of replication, high availability and automated testing technology. An even more in-depth discussion for those who really wish to understand the underlying technology is available in our advanced architecture overview white paper, Disaster Recovery and High Availability with WANSync: An Architectural Overview.
Read about the 5 key principles that guide the design of CA XOsoft High Availability Option for Exchange and all of CA XOsoft's products.
Gain a better understanding of the CA XOsoft Exchange high availability products by downloading a trial evaluation of our production software. Download our Business and IT Requirements for High Availability, white paper as a resource for your Exchange disaster recovery research.
Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our Exchange high availability automatic failover solution.
Be sure to contact us for information related to your specific MS Exchange replication and high availability needs. |
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