It is fairly easy to measure the costs of replacing lost hardware and data. However, it is difficult to assess the total cost of any downtime your server running Exchange 2000 experiences during a disaster.

Excessive downtime can result in the loss of sales, loss of customer goodwill, loss of productivity, loss of competitiveness, missed contractual obligations, and increased costs resulting from the need to makeup these losses.
Therefore, agreement should be made in advance on what the acceptable amount of downtime is for your Exchange 2000 organisation. This agreement is called a service level agreement. After you establish a service level agreement, you can determine what Exchange 2000 deployment and server configurations are best suited for that agreement.

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Premium Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Standard Edition
• Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server