Exchange 2007 SP1 Replication Options

Exchange 2007 SP1 provides a range of replication features to limit downtime. All the technologies shown in this chart enable an organization to replicate an Exchange mailbox storage unit (called a storage group) to a standby location, enabling quick recovery from failures. However, each differs in the kind of failures it can help recover from, the amount of work required to perform a recovery, and the hardware and setup requirements it imposes.

Standby Continuous Replication (SCR), introduced with SP1, offers some advantages over the existing alternatives. Like Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), SCR can reduce downtime from server and data center losses because it can replicate data to standby servers off-site. But SCR does not require the use of Windows Cluster Services, which imposes complex hardware and setup requirements. Furthermore, unlike CCR, SCR supports a replication delay to reduce the chance that corrupted data on a production server will corrupt its standby. However, SCR requires a manual (or scripted) recovery process, whereas CCR uses Cluster Services to recover automatically.