Your biggest problem is management. Whoever is in charge of IS and can
tolerate a week long outage of email should be fired. That's simply
unacceptable for any organization.
If I were you, I'd look at an outsourced Exchange solution. (Google for
it, I have no specific recommendations.) That way you'd get a highly
available solution, with a SLA, and skilled people to maintain it.
People don't really keep cold standbys of Exchange servers. To build a
highly available Exchange solution, you would need two copies of Windows
2003 Enterprise, clustered, with Exchange Enterprise, and some form of
shared storage.
Jerry Jones wrote:
I teach AP Computer Science and other computer classes in a large high
school district with 16 high school campuses. As you might imagine,
email is a very critical component of our communication. Our district
email Exchange server went down sometime late last Friday and four days
later, is still down. The District Office is always very mum when
something goes wrong on their end, no explaination what happenned, no
estimate of how long it will take to fix, and then once it is fixed they
act like "see how great we are, we fixed YOUR problem!" Last year the
Exchange server went down and was down for over a week. That time the
person administrating the server had decided to install some beta
Excahnge software the live Exchange server rather than a testbed. We
don't know what is the cause for the outage is this time, at least not
yet, the story is that the exchange server crashed and the backup died
with it.
It is appearant that the person or persons at the district level that
oversees IS does not place much importance on the technology that
supports our day to day function as teachers and as a school. I am sure
that large scale companies have equipment and procedures in place that
would keep mission critical functions such as email up and running even
if a server crashed, and in much less time than a week or more that we
seem to experience. My Principal is fed up and frustrated with the
situation and wants to get some understanding of what could be done to
prevent situations like this in the future. He has agreed to purchase a
new server for the school site that would at least keep school site
exchangfe mail up and running even when the district server is down, but
he also wants to suggest that the district office take stronger
proactive steps to mitigate future email outages. I am not an Exchange
expert but I am sure that there are things that could be done. Such as
having a backup Exchange server that kicks in if the primary crashes. I
am looking to the collective to gather a little information about how
real IS departments handle their Exchange servers and prevent something
like a crash from turning into a week long outage. Is it as simple as
having a backup exchange server running as a mirror? What suggestions
can I make?
Thanks,
Jerry
