Agree, your problem is not software/hardware, it's a people problem.
Perhaps
you have extremely stubborn headed mules at the top of the food chain, or
simply people who refuse to listen.
Start off with identifying how email is used in day-to-day activities. If
you have metrics to show how much productivity is affected per outage,
it'll
help, nice big numbers to show $$$ value.
Then you delve into the Exchange system that is being used - look into
what
can be done to make it more robust. Obviously, your exchange admin
deserves
to be shot for experimenting with a production server. It's all about
implementing processes. If a service is deemed critical, then what are the
logical steps to be taken to ensure that it sustains maximum uptime?
Implement change control - among other things, this implies restricted
access, clear separation of a test, dev and production environment (if
money
is tight, go with VMware instances for dev/test).... basically, it's about
accountability.
Deal with the hardware - is it old? Does it need to be upgraded? What can
be
done to hold things together in the short term? UPS solution? How about
rule
#1 "don't dick around with production systems"?
Define an alerting/alarming system that escalates all the way thru
management. A 1 week outage defies logic :) Coming down on the sysadmin
doesn't help, you need cooperation from IT management that serves the
entire
district.
If you still get no traction, that's still ok. The best thing you want to
get out of this, is a clearly defined process of escalation and trouble
tracking for IT problems. If Exchange goes down, who do you call
immediately? Do you log a ticket or case? How does it get followed up?
What
is the SLA (service level agreement)? You need to know that you will get a
response within X hours, a resolution within X hours / days per severity.
This all begins with identifying how critical this system is to your
school
and its operation. Obviously with a 1 week downtime, nobody really gave it
the attention it deserved.
Once you have a process in place, it is critical that the process is
followed. It may seem tedious but once there's measured accountability,
things really do get done right.
-alex
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ben Ruset
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 5:47 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H] making Exchange server mission critical
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
