In a previous post I have highlighted and demonstrated EMC’s robust and flexible feature set for protecting Microsoft Exchange 2010. Since that post, I wanted to share with The Backup Window readers a new EMC Solutions Group whitepaper. The paper details a Virtualized Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint solution utilizing both EMC Shared VNX Storage as well as EMC Backup & Recovery technology leveraging EMC Avamar.

Exchange and SharePoint are just some of those mission critical apps, which I hear from customers as particular pain points. Mainly the pain points stem from the fact that users (like you and I) use these applications constantly, and therefore the data explosion (emails and unstructured content) is particularly experienced within the realm of these two applications. For example, depending on your popularity, I am betting you got several email notifications that popped up on your screen while reading this post. End users and business lines demand that we keep up with their content generation levels and retain that data for longer periods of time.

This solution highlighted in this paper, was actually tested and analyzed in our EMC solutions labs and some pretty detailed performance data is included so you can really see the benefits and returns of leveraging EMC infrastructure as both a foundation for VMware, and backup and recovery.

I will leave most of the technical details to the white paper, but just to highlight some of the benefits this solution brings over to typical Exchange and SharePoint deployments:

• Enables a rapid yet application-consistent backup and restore using Microsoft VSS framework.
• Enables fast recovery to support strict recovery time objectives (RTOs) for databases and single items without requiring a slow item level based backup.
• Significantly reduces backup windows and backup storage footprints by using Avamar client-side data deduplication to only store unique daily changes, while always maintaining daily full  backups for immediate single-step restore.
• Provides easy management by using one Avamar GUI for Avamar backups.
• Provides hardware load balancing that introduces redundancy to SharePoint and improves SharePoint farm performance.

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