Exchange 2003 Recovery Site Design

[SRC_DR]

Hello All,

I would appreciate suggestions with designing a new site which will also serve as a Disaster Recovery site for the primary data-center (HQ). Thanks in advance!

A Client is hiring 100 additional employees but the current HQ building (with over 500 employees) does not have enough space to accommodate the new employees. The client is acquiring additional office space in a nearby building (A few blocks away) and it will have 100 Mbps connection to the HQ (but no fabric extension between the two buildings). The client would also like to utilize this new site as a DR site hosting critical IT services as data-centre space is available at the new location. There are two Exchange 2003 servers (no cluster) and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 4.1 at the HQ. Only about 200 users use BlackBerry devices. This is currently a centralized environment with about 100 employees located in 7 regional offices. Users currently use Outlook 2003 (in cached mode) to connect to HQ.

Here are the solution requirements:

1) Set up the new site so that the solution provides the ability to recover and operate the messaging system for all 700+ employees if the primary data-center in HQ is unavailable. An Internet connection and connections to the 7 regional offices will be available in the new expansion location. The new location should house the local 100 users' mailbox locally (instead of HQ servers). What Hardware/software/infrastructure configuration and methodology to adapt? Client is open to getting a cluster/SAN, etc., etc. for the new location. They currently use HP ProLiant DL servers and would like to stick with HP equipment and Exchange 2003 servers. They currently use Backup Exec with DLT tapes for off-site storage.

2) Each user has 100 MB mailbox size with typical average email usage for a business of this size. What would be the estimated timelines for full message recovery to the new site? Capabilities of solution and its dependencies? Any limitations and/or procedural requirements?

Thanks again.