High Availability

Email and collaboration availability—it’s critical to the success of your business. It’s also one of the biggest pain points imaginable. If it goes down, your customers and employees raise an uproar. Even worse, work comes to a standstill and, with it, revenue generation. That’s why high availability is so critical and why we’ve invested considerable resources into building a high availability Hosted Exchange environment. We own and manage the environment and take full responsibility for supporting it, unlike other Exchange providers.

High Availability
With no single points of failure in our Exchange environment and our years of experience supporting complex applications, Hosted Exchange delivers the highest levels of reliability, performance, and uptime. So it’s not your every-day hosted Exchange solution. It’s Hosted Exchange. High Availability makes a difference in a lot of ways.

Fully redundant High Availability (HA) infrastructure designed and built to minimize the impact of any component failure

Load balanced and clustered environment

Delivering 100% application uptime—guaranteed

High Performance Cluster
Downtime Protection—If a cluster node fails or is taken offline for maintenance, our passive-active cluster server configuration activates another node, protecting Hosted Exchange from downtime and service disruption.

Infinite Scalability—The Hosted Exchange clustered environment makes it easy to add Exchange servers and drives for storage without any downtime—creating an infinitely scalable and stable solution. Consistently High Performance—We intentionally keep our Exchange server utilization low to ensure that memory/CPU performance is never degraded.

Network Redundancy and Security—Hosted Exchange runs on Rackspace’s Zero-Downtime Network™. So 100% network uptime isn’t wishful thinking, it’s a guaranteed reality. Rackspace designed and built the Zero-Downtime Network to minimize downtime, which allows us to deliver fast response times to any issues that may arise.

Our Hosted Exchange servers are located in one of Rackspace’s 8 fully redundant, world-class data centers across the globe that are secured by keycards, biometric scanning, and constant surveillance in a fully redundant environment.

Zero-Downtime Network™ Utilizes Nine Network Providers—By building multiple redundancies into the network’s information flow to and from end users’ mailboxes, your mail is delivered fast.

Redundancy On Top of Redundancy—We ensure that all traffic and requests are efficiently processed without fail or delay. Our Hosted Exchange environment includes multiple firewalls and load balancers to keep it running smoothly under any circumstances and to protect your email and mailboxes.

Monitoring Exchange Performance
The entire Exchange Engineering Team works with advanced monitoring tools that keep a watchful eye over all aspects of the Hosted Exchange environment, 24x7x365. Intelligent systems built into our system keep Exchange working and email flowing, so that, should a component of our Hosted Exchange environment behave abnormally, automatic failover occurs behind the scenes, and users are never impacted. Simultaneously, our Exchange Engineering Team is immediately notified of the incident so they can identify the cause.

Data Center
A data center must be intentionally constructed from the floor up to offer high availability to the services hosted inside. With Rackspace (our parent company) as our data center provider, we are confident that the data center physical plant and network infrastructure will allow our customers and resellers to rest easy knowing services will always be available. Bandwidth
Best practices for high availability bandwidth are in place, such as the use of physically distant entry points for several tier-one network carriers, including WilTel, SBC, Sprint, AT&T, Qwest, Time Warner Telecom and MCI. Multiple edge routers and an internally redundant network co-designed with Cisco provide assurance that data will be routed to and from the Internet with low latency and high availability. Rackspace data centers offer a 100% network uptime guarantee (SLA). All important aspects of network availability and performance are monitored by staff on a 24x7 basis.

Power
Conditioned power is used for all servers and network equipment. In the event of a power degradation or outage, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) instantaneously provide the necessary energy to continue all services. Fail-over UPSs are also installed and configured to assume power control if needed. An extended outage would trigger on-site diesel engine generators. To ensure proper operation, the generators are regularly inspected and tested.

Cooling
A large capacity HVAC system is a must for server rooms packed with heat-producing servers. The HVAC system is also redundant in the event that primary coolers experience issues. To reduce dust and keep air cool, the air in the data center is filtered and cycled every 90 seconds.

Security
Continuous surveillance, biometric authentication, keycards, and limited access only to employees who have undergone thorough background checks make sure that only authorized individuals have physical access to servers and network equipment.

Fire Suppression
State of the art fire suppression is also in place to immediately halt the progress of any detected fire and to allow key services to continue without interruption.

Staff
All staff are certified and experienced in maintaining and monitoring critical networks and servers. Rackspace employs more RedHat Certified Engineers than any other hosting company in the world, and has more than 60 employees with Microsoft Certified Professional certificates. The combined experience of the personnel is extremely valuable in quickly solving common and not-so-common data center issues.