Exchange hosting providers are now offering hosting services based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 to its customers. Most of the customers have been waiting for SP1 before considering a complete move to Exchange 2007 from its previous versions (Exchange 2000/2003).
So what does the customer get as new features? Isn’t it the same old email, outlook web access, and mobile messaging? What else?
More or less the same as far as the basic user is concerned – the same old email, calendar, outlook web access but with a greater level of user experience. To those who run the business rather, IT managers, I would particularly highlight those features in terms of Disaster Recovery, Security and other aspects which could improve business functions. We will get into these new features & enhancements now:
Greater improvement in High Availability – Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Local Continuous Replication.
High Availability is really a top-most selling point for Hosting Providers, and every new version of Exchange give a satisfying answer with greater level of improvement. It continues… If you are considering a dedicated exchange server hosting solution, you have two options of high availability – Local Continuous Replication (LCR) & Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR).
LCR is sort of a clone of the production database in the hosted environment, in other words this clone is a redundant mirror of production database and this is stored in independent secondary storage devices. LCR can seamlessly switch to this passive database into active in the event the production server fails.
The CCR option gives the customeran alternate server as a passive node which keeps the mirrored copies of the database. Now customers who actually express the concerns of high availability & uptime, they must choose one of them depending on the cost & business criticality.
In my next post, I would like to write about more features which customers think relevant for business.