Exchange 2007 - storage requirements and clustering

Hi,

I am presenting several options to the business as regards a new
Exchange 2007 deployment.

We have 200 users, two datacentres which are not far from each other
connected by fibre (but use different IP address schemes), and a DR
site which is connected by a 10MBPS link.

I have pretty much done the solution using 3 different servers, DAS
storage for each server, and using SCR replication between the two
servers at the data centre, and using tape restore in a DR
environment.

However, I want to present an option which uses shared storage,
partially so we can do faster recovery (using snapshots, and similar
technology), but also so that we can get a storage solution in, and
use it for various applications.

If we used replicated shared storage, and effectively used SCC in
Exchange using Windows Server 2008, I have the following issues:

- Would the mailbox server in building 1 and 2 need to be on the same
IP address scheme?
- Could we have a separate server using the client access, hub
transport and acting as a witness server for the clustered mailbox
server?
- Could we use SCR for the DR site, or if we used SAN based
replication to the DR site, could we do anything with this?
- If we did go down the SAN route, would iSCSI be sufficient for 200
users?
- Would the Veritas Exchange backup agent be sufficient to back up the
Exchange server using a SCC, or do we need to look into anything
different?

The venders I am talking to at the moment are NetAp and FalconStor. I
am liking the FalconStor solution more at the moment, especially since
we can use any backend SAN hardware. However, one thing they are
saying is that they are putting the log volume on RAID-5, and using
the same volume as the Exchange database, since the FalconStor
software does cached writes to a separate RAID-10 volume, which I need
to quantify.

Budget will be a real issue for us, and in the past we have not
managed to get shared storage into the company.

Is there anything I am missing, any products I should be looking at in
addition to the ones I have already consulted, and any other points
that I could look at?

Thanks.
Andrew.
.

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