If you want to back up only some of your Outlook data, you can create a new backup .pst file of only the data that you want to save. This is also known as exporting .pst file data. For example, you might want to use this section if you have important information in only some folders and you have other, less important items in much larger folders. You can export only the important folders or contacts and omit folders like Sent Mail.

Follow these steps to export a specific folder:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the File menu, click Import And Export. If the menu item is not available, hover your pointer over the chevrons at the bottom of the menu, and then click Import and Export.
3. Click Export To File, and then click Next.
4. Click Personal Folder File (.pst) , and then click Next.
5. Click the folder that you want to export the .pst file to, and then click Next.
6. Click Browse, and then select the location where you want the new .pst file to be saved.
7. In the File Name box, , type the name that you want to use for the new .pst file, and then click OK.
8. Click Finish.

Note Folder design properties include permissions, filters, description, forms, and views. If you export items from one .pst file to another, no folder design properties are maintained.

To know how to back up your data if you use Outlook with a Microsoft Exchange Server, you have to know where the data is stored. The default delivery and storage location for Outlook data is the Exchange Server mailbox. The Exchange Server administrator usually handles backups of the mailboxes on the server. However, some Exchange Server administrators store Outlook data in a .pst file on your hard disk drive.

Follow these steps to see where Outlook is currently storing your data:

In Outlook 2007:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, click the Mail Setup tab, and then click E-mail Accounts.
2. In the Account Settings window, click the Data Files tab.If the Name field contains the word “Mailbox” followed by an e-mail name, Outlook stores data in folders on the Exchange Server. Contact the Exchange Server administrator for more information about how backups are handled.If the field contains the words “Personal Folder” or the name of a set of personal folders or .pst files, Outlook stores new messages, contacts, appointments, and other data in a .pst file on your hard disk. To back up the data, go to the “How to make a backup copy of a .pst file” section.

In an earlier version of Outlook:

1. On the Tools menu, click E-mail Accounts.Note This option might be unavailable on some networks. The network administrator might have removed this option to protect the account information. If you do not see the Email Accounts option, contact the network administrator for help.
2. Click View or Change Existing Email Accounts, and then click Next.
3. Look at the Deliver new e-mail to the following location option. If the option contains the word “Mailbox” followed by an e-mail name, Outlook stores data in folders on the Exchange Server. Contact the Exchange Server administrator for more information about how backups are handled.If the field contains the words “Personal Folder” or the name of a set of personal folders or .pst files, Outlook stores new messages, contacts, appointments, and other data in a .pst file on your hard disk. To back up the data, go to the “How to make a backup copy of a .pst file” section.

If you do not use Outlook with Microsoft Exchange Server, Outlook stores all its data in a .pst file. You can use the backup copy to restore your Outlook data if the original .pst file is damaged or lost. This article explains how to create a copy of your whole .pst file, with all the default items in the file.

Follow these steps to back up the whole .pst file:

1. Close any messaging programs such as Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, or Microsoft Windows Messaging.
2. Click Start, and then click Run. Copy and paste (or type) the following command in the Open box, and then press ENTER:
   control panel

   Control Panel opens.

   Note If you see the Pick a category screen, click User Accounts, and then go to step 3.

3. Double-click the Mail icon.
4. Click Show Profiles.
5. Click the appropriate profile, and then click Properties.
6. Click Data Files.
7. Under Name, click the Personal Folders Service that you want to back up. By default, this service is called Personal Folders. However, it may be named something else.Note If you have more than one Personal Folders Service in your profile, you must back up each set of .pst files separately.If there are no entries called Personal Folders and you have not yet stored any information such as messages, contacts, or appointments in Outlook, you probably have not yet enabled the Personal Folders Service. Go to the “References” section for information about how to create a .pst file.

   If you have no Personal Folders Services in your profile and you can store information such as messages, contacts, or appointments in Outlook, your information is probably being stored in a mailbox on an Exchange Server. Try using the instructions in the “How to back up .pst file data that is located on a Microsoft Exchange Server” section.

8. Click Settings, and then note the path and file name that appears.Note Because the .pst file contains all data that is stored in the MAPI folders that Outlook uses, the file can be very large. To reduce the size of the .pst file, click Compact Now in the Settings window.
9. Close all the Properties windows.
10. Use Windows Explorer or My Computer to copy the file that you noted in step 8. You can copy the file to another location on the hard disk drive or to any kind of removable storage media, such as a thumb drive, a CD-ROM, a portable hard disk drive, a magnetic tape cassette, or any other storage device.

I have had many people ask me what is the difference between the Seagate ST31000528AS hard drive and the Seagate ST31000524AS hard drive.

The only real difference is performance.
They are both considered high quality hard drives.

He is a simple comparison:

Seagate ST31000528AS
Series Barracuda
Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s
Capacity 1TB
RPM 7200
Cache 32MB
Average Latency 4.16ms
Form Factor 3.5 inches

VS

Seagate ST31000524AS
Series Barracuda
Interface SATA 6.0Gb/s
Capacity 1TB
RPM 7200
Cache 32MB
Average Latency 4.16ms
Form Factor 3.5 inches

So the only real difference between the two Seagate Barracuda hard drives is the Seagate ST31000528AS has a read / write speed of 3.0Gb/s while the Seagate ST31000524AS has a read / write speed of 6.0Gb/s.

Obviously I would prefer the faster hard-drive but both are high quality and reliable hard drives.

Eliminating potential single points of failure is a time-tested strategy for reducing the
risk of downtime and data loss. Typically, network administrators or computer consultants do this by introducing redundancy in the application delivery infrastructure, and automating the process of monitoring and
correcting faults to ensure rapid response to problems as they arise. Most leading
companies adopting best practices for protecting critical applications and data also
look at the potential for the failure of an entire site, establishing redundant systems at
an alternative site to protect against site-wise disasters.

STEP #1 – PROTECT AGAINST SERVER FAILURES WITH QUALITY….don’t be a cheapskate with your own business by using low quality CHEAPO server and network hardware. Use HIGH Quality hardware.

HARDWARE AND COMPONENT REDUNDANCY
Unplanned downtime can be caused by a number of different events, including:
• Catastrophic server failures caused by memory, processor or motherboard
failures

Server component failures including power supplies, fans, internal disks,
disk controllers, host bus adapters and network adapters
Server core components include power supplies, fans, memory, CPUs and main logic
boards. Purchasing robust, name brand servers, performing recommended
preventative maintenance, and monitoring server errors for signs of future problems
can all help reduce the chances of automation downtime due to catastrophic server
failure.

You can reduce downtime caused by server component failures by adding
redundancy at the component level. Examples are: redundant power and cooling,
ECC memory, with the ability to correct single-bit memory errors, and combining
Ethernet cards with RAID.

STEP #2 – PROTECT AGAINST STORAGE FAILURES WITH
STORAGE DEVICE REDUNDANCY AND RAID

Storage protection relies on device redundancy combined with RAID storage
algorithms to protect data access and data integrity from hardware failures. There are
distinct issues for both local disk storage and for shared, network storage.

For local storage, it is quite easy to add extra disks configured with RAID protection.
A second disk controller is also required to prevent the controller itself from being a
single point of failure.

Access to shared storage relies on either a fibre channel or Ethernet storage network.
To assure uninterrupted access to shared storage, these networks must be designed
to eliminate all single points of failure. This requires redundancy of network paths,
network switches, and network connections to each storage array.

STEP #3 – PROTECT AGAINST NETWORK FAILURES WITH
REDUNDANT NETWORK PATHS, SWITCHES AND ROUTERS

The network infrastructure itself must be fault-tolerant, consisting of redundant
network paths, switches, routers and other network elements. Server connections can
also be duplicated to eliminate fail-overs caused by the failure of a single server or
network component.

Take care to ensure that the physical network hardware does not share common
components. For example, dual-ported network cards share common hardware logic,
and a single card failure can disable both ports. Full redundancy requires either two separate adapters or the combination of a built-in network port along with a separate network adapter.

STEP #4 – PROTECT AGAINST SITE FAILURES WITH DATA
REPLICATION TO ANOTHER SITE

The reasons for site failures can range from an air conditioning failure or leaking roof
that affects a single building, a power failure that affects a limited local area, or a
major hurricane that affects a large geographic area. Site disruptions can last
anywhere from a few hours to days or even weeks.

There are two methods for dealing with site disasters. One method is to tightly couple
redundant servers across high speed/low latency links, to provide zero data-loss and
zero downtime. The other method is to loosely couple redundant servers over
medium speed/higher latency/greater distance lines, to provide a disaster recovery
(DR) capability where a remote server can be restarted with a copy of the application
database missing only the last few updates. In the latter case, asynchronous data
replication is used to keep a backup copy of the data.
Combining data replication with error detection and fail over tools can help to get a
disaster recovery site up and running in minutes or hours, rather than days.

Unplanned server and network downtime can be caused by a number of different events:

• Catastrophic server failures caused by memory, processor or motherboard
failures

• Server component failures including power supplies, fans, internal disks,
disk controllers, host bus adapters and network adapters

• Software failures of the operating system, middleware or application

• Site problems such as power failures, network disruptions, fire, flooding or
natural disasters

To protect critical applications from downtime, you need to take steps to protect
against each potential source of downtime.

Eliminating potential single points of failure is a time-tested technical strategy for reducing the
risk of downtime and data loss. Typically, network administrators do this by introducing redundancy in
the application delivery infrastructure, and automating the process of monitoring and
correcting faults to ensure rapid response to problems as they arise. Most leading
companies adopting best practices for protecting critical applications and data also
look at the potential for the failure of an entire site, establishing redundant systems at
an alternative site to protect against site-wide disasters.

A failure of a critical Microsoft Windows application can lead to two types of losses:

• Loss of the application service – the impact of downtime varies with the
application and the business. For example, for some businesses, email can
be an absolutely business-critical service that costs thousands of dollars a
minute when unavailable.

• Loss of data – the potential loss of data due to an outage can have
significant legal and financial impact, again depending on the specific type of
application.

In determining the impact of downtime, you must understand the cost to your
business in downtime per minute or hour. In some cases, you can determine a
quantifiable cost (orders not taken). Other, less direct costs may include loss of
reputation and customer churn.

The loss of production data can also be very costly, for a variety of reasons. In the
manufacturing environment, the loss of data could affect compliance with regulations,
leading to wasted product, fines, and potentially hazardous situations. For example, if
a pharmaceutical company that is manufacturing drugs does not show all of the
records of its collected data from the manufacturing process, the FDA could force the
company to throw away its entire batch of drugs. Because it is critical to know the
value for every variable when manufacturing drugs, the company could face fines for
not complying with FDA regulations.

Publicly-traded companies may need to ensure the integrity of financial data, while
financial institutions must adhere to SEC regulations for maintaining and protecting
data. For monitoring and control software, data loss and downtime interrupts your
ability to react to events, alarms, or changes that require immediate corrective action.

The bottom line is downtime is very expensive and preventing downtime is the most important factor in any business operation.

All organizations are becoming increasingly reliant upon their computer systems. The
availability of those systems can be the difference between the organization succeeding
and failing. A commercial organization that fails is out of business with the consequences
rippling out to suppliers, customers, and the community.

This series will examine how we can configure our Windows Server 2008 environments to
provide the level of availability our organizations need. The topics we cover will comprise:

• The Art of High Availability—What do we mean by high availability? Why do we
need it, and how do we achieve it?

• Windows Server 2008 Native Technologies—What does Windows Server 2008
bring to the high?availability game, and how can we best use it?

• Non?Native Options for High Availability—Are there other ways of achieving high
availability, and how can we integrate these solutions into our environments?

The first question we need to consider is why we need highly available systems.

Why Do We Need It?
This question can be turned on its head by asking “Do all of our systems need to be highly
available?” The answer for many, if not most, organizations is no. The art of high
availability comes in deciding which systems need to be made highly available and how this
is going to be achieved. When thinking about these systems, we need to consider the effects
of the systems not being available.

Downtime Hurts
Downtime is when the computer system is unavailable to the user or customer and the business
process cannot be completed. If the server is up and the database is online but a network
problem prevents access, the system is suffering downtime. Availability is an end?to?end
activity. Downtime hurts in two ways: If a system is unavailable, the business process it
supports cannot be completed and there is an immediate loss of revenue. This could be due
to:

• Customer orders not being placed or being lost
• Staff not working
• Orders not being processed

The second way that downtime hurts is loss of reputation. This loss can be even more
damaging in the long term if customers decide that your organization cannot be trusted to
deliver and they turn to a competitor. The ability to gain business increases with ease of
communication and access. The converse is that the ability to lose business increases just
as fast if not faster.

Mission Critical Systems on Microsoft Windows
Critical business systems are hosted on the Microsoft Windows platform. These can be customer
facing or internal, but without them, the business grinds to a halt. Email may not seem to be
a critical system, but it is essential to the modern business. More than 60% of person to person
communication is via email in most businesses. This includes internal and external
communications. If a company is non?responsive to communications, it is judged, perhaps
harshly, as being out of business. This can become reality if it progresses too long.

24 × 7 Business Culture
The “Global Village” concept has been accelerated by the adoption of the Internet for
business purposes. Globalization in this case means that business can come from anywhere
in the world—not necessarily your own time zone. If your business competes at this level,
high availability isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

Legislation
Industries such as the financial services and health sector have a requirement to protect
the data they store. This requirement can involve the availability of the data. In other cases,
the systems must be highly available to meet safety requirements.

Once you know why you need it, you need to define what is meant by high availability.

What Is High Availability?
High availability is usually expressed in terms of a number of “9”s. Four nines is 99.99%
availability. The ultimate goal is often expressed as 5 “9”s availability (99.999%), which
equates to five and a quarter minutes of downtime per year. The more nines we need, the
greater the cost to achieve that level of protection.

One common argument is scheduled downtime. If downtime is scheduled, for example, for
application of a service pack, does that mean the system is unavailable? If the system is
counted as unavailable, any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on downtime will probably
be broken. In hosting or outsourcing scenarios, this could lead to financial penalties.
However, if scheduled downtime doesn’t mean the system is counted as unavailable,
impressive availability figures can be achieved—but are they a true reflection of
availability to the users? There is no simple answer to these questions, but all systems
require preventative maintenance or they will fail. The disruption to service can be
minimized (for example, the patching nodes of a cluster in sequence) but cannot be
completely eliminated. Probably the best that can be achieved is to ensure that
maintenance windows are negotiated into the SLA.

These measurements are normally taken against the servers hosting the system. As we
have seen, the server being available doesn’t necessarily mean the system is available. We
have to extend our definition of highly available from protecting the server to also include
protecting the data.

The Server Clustering Service built?in to Microsoft Windows is often our first thought for protecting the
server. In the event of failure, the service automatically fails over to a standby server, and
the business system remains available. However, this doesn’t protect the data in that a
failure in the disk system, or even network failures, can make the system unavailable.

Do We Still Need to Back Up our server and data?
One common question is “Do I still need to take a backup?” The only possible answer is
YES! High availability is not, and never can be, a substitute for a well?planned backup
regimen. Backup is your ultimate “get out of jail card.” When all else fails, you can always
restore from backup. However, this pre supposes a few points.

• Test restores have been performed against the backup media. The last place you
  want to be is explaining why a business?critical system cannot be restored because
  the tapes cannot be read.

• A plan exists to perform the restore that has been tested and practiced. Again, you
  don’t want to be performing recoveries where the systems and steps necessary for
  recovery are not understood.

Backup also forms an essential part of your disaster recovery planning.

Disaster Recovery vs. High Availability
These two topics, high availability and disaster recovery, are often thought of as being the
same thing. They are related but separate topics. High availability can be best summed up
as “keeping the lights on.” It is involved with keeping our business processes working and
dealing with day?to?day issues. Disaster recovery is the process and procedures required to
recover the critical infrastructure after a natural or man?made disaster. The important
point of disaster recovery planning is restoring the systems that are critical to the business
in the shortest possible time.

Traditionally, these are two separate subjects, but the technologies are converging. One
common disaster recovery technique is replicating the data to a standby data center. In the
event of a disaster, this center is brought online and business continues. There are some
applications, such as relational database systems and email systems, that can manage the
data replication to another location. At one end of the scale, we have a simple data
replication technique with a manual procedure required to bring the standby data online in
place of the primary data source. This can range up to full database mirroring where
transactions are committed to both the primary and mirror databases and fail over to the
mirror can be automatically triggered in the event of applications losing access to the
primary. In a geographically dispersed organization where systems are accessed over the
WAN, these techniques can supply both high availability and disaster recovery.

We have seen why we need high availability and what it is. We will now consider how we
are going to achieve the required level of high availability.

Achieving High Availability
When high availability is discussed, the usual assumption is that we are talking about
clustering Windows systems. In fact, technology is one of three areas that need to be in
place before high availability works properly:

• People

• Processes

• Technology

People and Processes
These are the two points that are commonly overlooked. I have often heard people say that
clustering is hard or that they had a cluster for the application but still had a failure. More
often than not, these issues come down to a failure of the people and processes rather than
the technology.

The first question that should be asked is “Who owns the system?” The simple answer is
that IT owns the system. This is incorrect. There should be an established business owner
for all critical systems. They are the people who make decisions regarding the system from
a business perspective—especially decisions concerning potential downtime. A technical
owner may also be established. If there is no technical owner, multiple people try to make
decisions that are often conflicting. This can have a serious impact on availability.
Ownership implies responsibility and accountability. With these in place, it becomes
someone’s job to ensure the system remains available.

A second major issue is the skills and knowledge of the people administering highly
available systems. Do they really understand the technologies they are administering?
Unfortunately, the answer is often that they don’t. We wouldn’t make an untrained or
unskilled administrator responsible for a mainframe or a large UNIX system. We should
ensure the same standards are applied to our highly available Windows systems. I once
worked on a large Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 migration. This involved a number of
multi?node server clusters, each running several instances of Microsoft Exchange. One of the Microsoft Exchange
administrators asked me “Why do I need to know anything about Active Directory?” Given
the tight integration between Exchange and Active Directory (AD), I found this an
incredible question. This was definitely a case of untrained and unskilled network administrator.

Last, but very definitely not least, we need to consider the processes around our high availability
systems. In particular, two questions need to be answered:

• Do we have a change control system?

• Do we follow it?

If the answer to either of these is no, our system won’t be highly available for very long. In
addition, all procedures we perform on our systems should be documented and tested.
They should always be performed as documented.

Technology
Technology will be the major focus of the next two articles, but for now, we need to
consider the wider implications of high availability. We normally concentrate on the
servers and ensure that the hardware has the maximum levels of resiliency. On top of this,
we need to consider other factors:

• Network—Do we have redundant paths from client to server? Does this include
  LAN, WAN, and Internet access?

• Does the storage introduce a single point of failure?

• Has the operating system (OS) been hardened to the correct levels? Is there a
  procedure to ensure it remains hardened?

• Does our infrastructure in terms of AD, DNS, and DHCP support high availability?

• Does the application function in a high?availability environment?

Costs
Highly?available systems explicitly mean higher costs due to the technology and people we
need to utilize. The more availability we want, the higher the costs will rise. A business
decision must be made regarding the cost of implementing the highly?available system
when compared against the risk to the business of the system not being available.

This calculation should include the cost of downtime internally together with potential loss
of business and reputation. When a system is unavailable and people can’t work, the final
costs can be huge leading to the question “We lost how much?”

Summary
You need high availability data solutions to ensure your business processes keep functioning. This ensures
your revenue streams and your business reputation are protected. We help you achieve high availability
through the correct mixture of people, processes, and technology.

Why Microsoft Office 2010?

Because your business success depends on productivity.

If you’re like most Business Owners and IT decision-makersin in Orlando and Central Florida , you face a tough balancing act—to support your company’s diverse business needs and varied employee work styles, while efficiently providing consistent technology with reduced budgets and staff.

You are expected to extend capabilities to mobile workers, improve information workflow, and reduce
risk. You need a reliable technology consulting firm to respond quickly to constantly changing business
requirements. You must control the costs of support, training, and integration and connect your users with
key business processes while you protect vital company information.

Where do you turn with such enormous challenges?
SIMPLE: Contact Central Florida Computer Engineering for the reliable IT support you need to make your business succeed.

Discover how you can meet all these challenges with one, efficient, cost-effective platform—
Microsoft Office 2010 and the related Microsoft business productivity servers.

What’s New in Office 2010?

Microsoft Office 2010 helps you rise to the challenge of today’s business environment without losing
sight of what’s needed for IT success. The people in your organization can now work in ways that
are faster, easier, and more intuitive. What’s more, your IT staff can take advantage of a set of smart,
security-enhanced, easy-to-integrate tools, so you can grow your business instead of your budget.

Microsoft Office has been the productivity standard for quite some time. Features like Copy and Paste
and the Ribbon toolbar—which were breakthroughs when they were introduced—have now been
further enhanced. Advanced new capabilities have also been added that will become the new standards
in productivity for the future.

With Office 2010, productivity knows no boundaries. Microsoft Office 2010 can keep your employees in
touch and working effectively no matter where they are. They can use the same applications from their
PCs, from a smartphone, or from a Web browser—and they can even switch between modes of access
without losing a thing. And now that Office Web Apps are available as lightweight companions that
can be hosted on premises, your IT staff gains more manageability and control. All those reasons make
Office 2010 a “must have” productivity tool for any organization.

Top New Capabilities

Office Web Apps are online companions to Microsoft Word,
Excel®, PowerPoint®, and OneNote® that let you review and
make light edits to documents from a supported browser.
Feel confident with your data since document formatting
and content are maintained when edits are done in the browser.
Office Web Apps can be hosted on premises, running on
Microsoft SharePoint.

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 lets you keep your
important SharePoint documents and lists available offline. It
automatically syncs only the changes, so you get them fast even
over a low-bandwidth connection.

Office Mobile gives co-workers in different locations the
ability to share, edit, and comment on documents with
their smartphones, using a familiar Office experience that is
optimized for mobile devices.

Microsoft Office 2010 keeps security in mind while
helping people work better together through
collaboration without compromise.

Co-authoring supports simultaneous editing to reduce the
administrative work associated with team collaboration;
security is not compromised since the information can be
hosted on premises.

Conversation View, Clean Up, and Ignore in Outlook 2010 can
group messages, remove duplicate information from message
threads, and act like a “mute button” for your inbox. Mail Tips
give users important information before they hit “send” to avoid
unnecessary, embarrassing, or even damaging e-mail.

Broadcast Slide Show allows you to present a slideshow
directly from PowerPoint 2010 to anyone who can access a
Web browser by hosting the content on premises through
SharePoint, or through a free service provided over the Internet.

The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector gives you a people-centric view
of your company, including messages, meeting schedules,
attachments, and SharePoint activities like the posting of status
updates. And because it can be connected to popular social
networking sites, you can also get news from customers,
prospects, and partners.

Microsoft Office 2010 provides tools that help people
draw insights from information and bring
ideas to life.

PowerPivot for Excel 2010 gives you the ability to quickly
calculate data sets of hundreds of millions of rows from multiple
sources at lightning speed—which can eliminate the need
to purchase additional BI tools. Sparklines save real estate
on-screen by charting trends in a single cell adjacent to the
corresponding data.

Photo and video editing tools in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 can trim a video
clip, turn a color film into black & white, add artistic effects to
photos, and more without the need for expensive third-party tools.

Ribbon toolbar is now provided in all applications, so your
team can find the commands they need most often and
ultimately deliver better results, faster. The new Microsoft Office
Backstage view gives everyone quick access to important
operations such as viewing document information, saving,
printing, and sharing; it’s extensible, so it can be customized
to surface commands or workflow operations that are most
important to people in your organization.

Microsoft Office 2010 was designed with performance,
security, and manageability in mind, making it
the practical productivity platform for IT.

Maximize performance across the hardware you already own,
while also positioning your organization for future hardware
investments such as 64-bit chips, advanced graphics cards, and
multicore processors.

The Trusted Documents and Protected View features of layered
defense combine to first determine the trustworthiness of
a document and then, if not trusted, open for viewing in a
protected area for users to view before enabling. This tiered
approached to document security is new in Office 2010.

Backstage view, Web Apps, and application services such
as Excel Services help users connect to important business
information and services, without leaving their familiar Microsoft
Office environment, which increases participation in server
investments and reduces training costs.

The Accessibility checker scans documents for issues that
will affect users with disabilities. It also helps eliminate errors
before they can cause harm to the business to maintain legal
compliance with statutory requirements.

Compare Microsoft Office 2010 to Previous Versions of Microsoft Office
See how much more efficient your organization can be with Microsoft Office 2010. Although not
a comprehensive list of features, this chart shows why Office 2010 is a critical tool to extend
productivity. It also increases the value of your existing IT infrastructure and helps you accomplish more,
even with fewer resources.

Note: Some features require a related Microsoft Business Productivity Server or Service such
as Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, or Office Communications Server
to be enabled. If your organization is located around Orlando Florida or in Central Florida we can help you choose the best options for your organizational goals and budget.

Which Microsoft 2010 Office suite is right for you?

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks.

I prefer to call them Redundant Array of Independent disks because they use to be very expensive.

A RAID array is a set of multiple hard drives that make up a data storage system built for redundancy or business continuity. In most but not all configurations a RAID storage system can tolerate the failure of a hard drive without losing data however this ultimately depends on how the RAID array is configured.

Different RAID Levels and Their Common Uses

Each RAID level have pro’s and con’s and it is up to a network administrator to decide which RAID level is best for a specific situation. There are many factors to be taken into consideration and it boils down to Speed – performance and budget.

Here are some examples of some of some common RAID configurations or RAID levels.

RAID Level 0

RAID Level 0 provides no redundancy whatsoever and is completely foolish to use in a business environment for storing critical data. With a RAID 0 configuration if one hard drive dies the entire RAID array dies and you can kiss all of data on the RAID array goodbye when this happens. RAID 0 is usually popular with computer video gamers that only take performance into consideration and RAID 0 is usually twice as fast as other RAID levels. Re read this paragraph before considering using RAID 0 it to store your precious data. RAID Level 0 splits or stripes the data across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in total and complete data loss. Raid Level 0 is only used to increase hard drive performance.  A RAID 0 configuration uses 2 hard drives and you get the storage capacity of both of the hard drives. Example if you have 2 100 gig hard drives then you get 200 gigs of NON redundant storage space.

RAID Level 1

RAID Level 1 is usually referred to as hard drive mirroring AKA a mirror. A Level 1 RAID array provides redundancy by duplicating all the data from one drive on a second drive so that if one of the two hard drives drive fails, no data is lost. RAID 1 is very good for small businesses because it is affordable and reliable. A RAID 1 configuration uses 2 hard drives so if you have 2 identical hard drives you get the storage capacity of 1 of those hard drives. Example if you have a pair of 100 gig hard drives then you get 100 gigs of redundant storage space.

RAID Level 5

RAID Level 5 stripes data at a block level across several drives and distributes parity among the drives. No single disk is devoted to parity. This can speed small writes in multiprocessing systems. Because parity data is distributed on each drive, read performance tends to be lower than other RAID types.

The actual amount of available storage is about 70% to 80% of the total storage in the disk array. The storage penalty for redundancy is only about 20% to 30% of the total storage in the RAID 5 array. If one disk fails it is possible to rebuild the complete data set so that no data is lost. If more than one drive fails all the stored data will be lost. This gives a fairly low cost per megabyte while still retaining redundancy.
A RAID 5 configuration uses 3 or more hard drives. If you have for the sake of an example, 3 100 gig hard drives then you get approximately 200 gigs of actual storage capacity.

RAID 1+10

Raid 1+10 is commonly known as RAID 10 and is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 – mirroring. What this means is you have 4 hard drives, 2 sets of the hard drives are each on a RAID 0 configuration and are then mirrored together on a RAID 1 configuration. Data is striped across the data mirror which provides both high performance and redundancy together. Any one of the hard drives can fail without data loss as long as the data mirror is not damaged. The RAID 10 array offers both high speed data transfer (write speed) advantages of striped arrays and increased data accessibility (read speed). System performance during a RAID rebuild drive is also better than that of parity based arrays, since data does not need to be regenerated from parity information, but is copied from the mirrored hard drive to another.

Now that you know what RAID is and what common RAID levels are used today never ever assume a RAID system is a backup solution because it is not. An Orlando computer consultant can help you decide which RAID level is best for your business or organization. Don’t ever just blindly purchase a server without the guidance of a professional network administrator. Without professional guidance you may go overboard and waste money on a RAID system that you don’t really need or you may wind up getting a RAID system that offers no data protection at all.