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Protecting BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Protecting All Components of BlackBerry Mobile Email

Mobile email services are becoming a critical function for businesses of all sizes. Traveling and mobile workers, including company executives, rely on email to stay connected and productive while away from the office.

The BlackBerry mobile email back-end for Microsoft Exchange includes three major components: the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), the Microsoft SQL Server database used by BES, and the Microsoft Exchange Server. To ensure 24x7 BlackBerry high availability, all three of these components must be protected from unplanned system downtime. Each component must have high availability protection to prevent planned downtime resulting from reconfiguration, hardware upgrades, hot fixes and service packs. They must be protected from data loss or corruption, and site failures or disasters. Clustering or data replication technologies, combined with failover capabilities, are often used to protect BES. However, these solutions don't address all three components, and they often require BES administrators to create special failover scripts.

A Better High Availability Alternative Than BlackBerry Failover

Marathon's everRun^® software provides complete high availability and disaster recovery for all components of your BES back-end: BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), Microsoft SQL Server database used by BES, and Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as additional infrastructure components including Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and Global Catalog servers.

everRun is a great choice for protecting BES and Exchange Microsoft high availability and related database applications:

• Higher levels of availability than competing failover solutions
• Selectable fault-tolerance using a range of everRun products along with the "availability dial" of everRun VM
• Simple to install and manage with no need for specialized staff experience or training
• Solutions for both virtual and physical environments
• Solutions for local, near-distance and long-distance availability and data protection
• Choice of either locally-attached or networked storage
• Built-in failover policy eliminates complex policy definition and the potential for policy errors
• Sophisticated error detection is faster and more reliable than simple heartbeats
• Cost effective for a wide range of BlackBerry environments
• High availability protection for all three major BlackBerry/Exchange components with a single solution

everRun BlackBerry High Availability Protection

Diagram 1 shows the three major BlackBerry components running as separate virtual machines protected by everRun VM. The virtual machines for BlackBerry Server, SQL Server and Exchange Server are balanced across three servers to evenly spread the processing load.

everRun BlackBerry Disaster Recovery Protection

Diagram 2 shows a BlackBerry/Exchange configuration in a disaster recovery scenario using everRun DR across two extended distance sites. everRun VM is used for local high availability protection as well as a way to use virtualization benefits to simplify management and reduce cost of the disaster recovery solution. At the production site, the BlackBerry Server, SQL Server and Exchange Server are running as individual virtual machines across a pool of three servers. At the disaster site, the same virtual machines are configured to run on only two servers, illustrating that the primary and disaster site configurations can be different. This allows companies to save cost by optimizing the disaster site configurations to the specific needs of disaster recovery operation. Data is replicated across the two sites in real time using everRun DR. Failover is also managed by everRun DR.

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