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The MS Exchange single store is stable now, isn't it?..

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true story
A site I know upgraded from MSEX 5.5 to MSEX2003 a few weeks ago.  At the same time, they upgraded Outlook to Outlook 2003.  This was for 500 users, conducted over a weekend.  Four hours after the upgrade was complete, the mail environment  came to a standstill.   The cause (as proven by MS a few days later) was one users mail file became corrupt (this is EX 2003 remember!) and it corrupted the WHOLE DATA STORE.  So...
A restore was kicked off to bring back to a "safe" point.  Six hours later, it happened again.  How was it solved?  Rollback to 5.5 and rollback the clients.  Can you possibly imagine this happening with Domino?  Some points...
  • If Domino became corrupt, it would not wreck all the files
  • If Domino became corrupt, you would know exactly what files became corrupt
  • You would only have to restore those files
  • You would not have to rollback the client!
  • This doesn't happen with notes.

What is the outcome..... they are planning to try it again in a month.  
Give me strength.....

Posted by Paul Mooney On 22/12/2005 | Digg This |

Comments

1 - What will be different in a month? Perhaps they'll sack the user whose file became corrupt!

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 22:57:15 On 22/12/2005 | - Website - |


2 - I am at a loss for words. And MS has the nerve to take pot shots at Domino. Think Peter de Haas will comment on how this was a good thing?

Sean---

Posted by Sean Burgess At 18:20:21 On 23/12/2005 | - Website - |


3 - I know! All they could identify was which users' account caused the problem, not WHAT caused the problem. And then the only solution was to rollback the server and the clients?
unbelieveable

Posted by Paul Mooney At 16:36:42 On 23/12/2005 | - Website - |


4 - This was one of the very compelling arguments for me moving from Exchange to Domino in the first place.

The best thing that place can do is to sync the user's message store with Outlook, delete the user's account on Exchange and re-create it, then sync the user's PST file with the new account (a very Domino replication style solution).

I had a major failure on an MS Exchange 5.5 Server a few years back. Everything gone. The only thing was to rollback.

There are tools to try and fix the message store but it's usually a case of start the tool and come back in 24 hours, after which time nothing has happened.

My solution to the problem was:
1. Restore from previous backup
2. Migrate to Domino

Do you know what?

Since step 2 I've not had this problem again. Strange that!

Posted by Chris Fogarty At 10:36:36 On 24/12/2005 | - Website - |