White Paper: Fast and Simple Recovery of Your Critical Microsoft® Applications with Symantec Backup Exec™

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Introduction to protecting Microsoft® applications

Companies today face the ever-increasing challenge of managing the explosive growth of valuable data. Symantec Backup Exec™ 12.5 for Windows Servers is the gold standard in Windows® data protection, providing cost-effective, high-performance, disk-to-disk-to-tape backup and recovery. Continuous data protection for Microsoft applications, including Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, and SharePoint, helps ensure that data is continuously backed up as it changes.

Protecting these Microsoft applications within your allotted backup window—and recovering them quickly and reliably—presents a formidable challenge. Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 simplifies and streamlines the process with centralized administration, continuous protection, patent pending granular recovery, and more.

What’s new in Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 application protection:

• Improved media management of Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) enabled backups to align with current media management policies, procedures, and data retention guidelines – Enhanced SharePoint Agent GRT now provides the ability to recover individual SharePoint objects such as sites, sub-sites, lists, and list items
• Support for off-host backups of Exchange with GRT-enabled backups using the Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 advanced disk based backup option (ADBO), which enables off-host backup protection
• Support for remote and removable disk locations for GRT-enabled backups – Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 including FileStream and SQL database compression
• Support for Windows Server 2008 Active Directory
• Support for integrated consistency checks of Active Directory backups
• Support for Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)

Redefining Exchange Server data protection

Email applications have become key communication tools for businesses of all sizes. Today, email is the most common and vital form of communication, often replacing the phone as the preferred mechanism for exchanging information in the business world. It is a more efficient and cost-effective way of disseminating information of all types (text, image, video, and even voice) to fellow employees and between companies located anywhere in the world. In fact, because companies consider their messaging servers to be mission critical, these are among the first servers to be recovered after a disaster—sometimes even before phone systems.

Various recent reports indicate that:

• 75 percent of a typical company’s intellectual property is contained in email
• 79 percent of companies accept email as written confirmation of transactions
• 75 percent of Fortune 500 litigation entails discovery of email communications

While businesses need email data to be protected and available, the amount of such data needing protection is growing exponentially—at a rate of 40 to 50 percent per year. IT is faced with the challenge of backing up this critical Microsoft Exchange data within the existing backup window and recovering it quickly.

The objective of traditional backups is to minimize downtime for the enterprise messaging environment while providing the fastest possible data recovery in the event of a system crash, database corruption, loss of a single mailbox, or other data loss. In order to maintain the availability of Exchange and protect its mission-critical data stores, companies go to great lengths to protect their Exchange environments. Today, this protection is primarily accomplished through online backups of the Exchange databases. If organizations also need to recover individual email messages or mailboxes, a separate slow and error-prone “brick-level” mailbox backup is typically required to recover each individual item without restoring the entire Exchange database.

Symantec Backup Exec for Windows Servers redefines traditional Exchange protection, eliminating daily Exchange backup windows with continuous data protection. And whether protecting Exchange continuously or not, Backup Exec also eliminates the need for slow, arduous mailbox backups while still allowing the recovery of individual email messages, folders, and mailboxes with patent pending Granular Recovery Technology (GRT).

Current administrators have two basic ways to back up Exchange Server data—at the database level, and at the mailbox level.

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