Virtual Winfrastructure

Help – I need that email I deleted!

 

Anyone who knows me wouldn't be surprised to hear that I delete just about everything in my Inbox. I don't like clutter. I have been known to put dishes away when my guests are still using them even though they only walked away for a minute. I carry this with me to work and I don't know why but seeing an inbox full of emails drives me nuts so I just delete 'em while they come in…and I get a lot of emails (don't get me wrong co-workers and friends, I actually read the emails but why do I need to save them?! I either send a response, file in a folder for reference, or I nuke it)!

Well as you can imagine, this gets me into hot water every now and then. There are times when I try to find an email I remember receiving or someone has referenced and I can't find it anywhere. Sure, I can use the "Recover Deleted Items" option in Exchange (best feature in Exchange\Outlook if you ask me) but if your company is like ours, this only goes so far back because it is costly to store and protect employee's deleted items.

So what do I do when I need to retrieve a long lost email? Well, previously I didn't have many options outside of asking someone to resend it or fumbling my way through the issue. Luckily, I've never been in a situation where my job or an important deal depended on it. Well, now I have another reason why I can continue to wear out my delete button!

Introducing EMC ItemPoint! ItemPoint is software that when used with EMC Replication Manager, it allows you to quickly search and recover Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, attachments, contacts and even tasks! If you are an existing EMC customer and you are using EMC snaps, clones or RecoverPoint continuous data protection (CDP) than you already have easy access to array based replicas of your Exchange data. To recover an individual item, simply right-click on your backup from within Replication Manager and choose Restore – Item Level as seen in the screen shot below.

 

Then select the backup or replica that you want to recover an item from, specify the source Exchange files and find the email or item you are looking for from within the backup. What's great is that you can choose to connect to the target mailbox that you want to restore the email or item to and simply drag and drop the recovered item back to the live Exchange system. By the time you pick up the phone and tell the user to look in their inbox for the recovered item it will already be there!!

ItemPoint includes an advanced search function so if you forget the subject of the email you can look for additional details such as dates, who the email was sent to or from and even perform searches within attachments!! Additional features include ItemPoint ExtractWizards to recover items from a backup server including support for backup products such as Windows NT Backup, Symantec Backup Exec and EMC Networker as well the ability to assist with migrations including automating the process to copy legacy email to a new server.

Interested to learn more?...check out Sam's Inside the Partnership video on YouTube where he explains the Exchange recovery process and provides a demo of ItemPoint recovering a much needed email. 

If email is as critical in your environment as it is in ours, than ItemPoint is something you should be using to ensure you can provide easy item level recovery for end users or to assist with data retrieval as part of your company regulations!

Lightning Strikes!

Earlier this week EMC announced a new server Flash caching solution called VFCache, a hardware and software solution that leverages PCIe Flash technology to extend performance based caching from the storage array to the server. VFCache (codenamed "Project Lightning") increases throughput and reduces latency with a focus towards read intensive workloads including Microsoft SQL Server.

When used with an EMC Flash enabled array, VFCache can actually increase throughput up to 3x which means customers can extend the benefits they are seeing on the EMC array since the use of an embedded SSD on the PCIe card helps to bridge the performance gap between the server and storage. VFCache reduces the need to access data across the network from the storage array which is what helps to decrease the response times and increase the performance of the application. VFCache automatically determines which data is being frequently accessed and promotes this to the server Flash cache so reads are being serviced by VFCache while writes are being directed to the storage array.

(for an excellent and highly detailed overview on VFCache, I strongly recommend you read VirtualGeek's blog post on this subject)

In a recent white paper entitled EMC VFCache Accelerates Microsoft SQL Server, we tested an online transaction processing (OLTP) database on SQL Server 2008 using a 90% reads to 10% writes workload. After establishing a baseline, the VFCache was enabled and testing proved an increase of transactions per second (TPS) from 1.0 TPS to 3.6 TPS – an increase of 260%!!!

 

The test results also displayed a reduction in latency from 1.0 read latencies to 0.13! 

 
So what's next? Well EMC has already indicated that another announcement called Project Thunder will be out in Q2 of 2012 and you know what they say…when you see Lightning, Thunder is close by! Stay tuned!