NetApp and single mailbox recovery

In this month’s Windows IT Pro, I wrote a buyer’s guide article on Exchange recovery tools. This just in from an admin who works for the city government of a large city in Virginia:

Thanks for putting this article together. I just wanted to let you know we are just about to implement a NetApp solution for Exchange 2003 and without NetApp’s Single Mailbox Recovery product, not mentioned as needed in this article, it is impossible to Backup and Recover Individual Mailboxes, Recover Individual Items or Search and Query for Items to be Recovered. I wanted to let you know because their software is expensive and this product is an extra cost.

Yikes! My apologies for that. When I do a buyers’ guide, I write the article itself that accompanies the guide, and I work with the magazine’s editors to come up with a list of criteria, plus a list of products that meet those criteria. In this case, the selection criteria included the ability to do brick-level backups, the ability to search and query, and the ability to recover individual items. We don’t usually ask vendors to list out all the products, submodules, agents, or other components that have to be installed to meet the criteria. For example, for backup solutions we don’t ask whether there’s a separate Exchange agent or not. Mail like this makes me think that maybe we should, though, because it’s frustrating to buy what you think is a complete solution, only to find out that you have to lay out even more money to get the whole package.