Hi I am an Exchange admin at our company. We are running Exchange 2003. At the moment, we have multiple Exchange servers and use Netbackup to backup the databases. All working well. We are moving to Exchange 2007, and we were looking at the options for backing up Exchange. Things will change slightly in that we will have many more Exchange databases to backup. With 2003, we four SG's per server, and four Mailbox Stores per SG. With Exchange 2007, we will have around 40 Mailbox Databases per server. Will Netbackup continue to work for us, since there are so many different databases? I assume Netbackup works along the thought of backing up one DB, once that's finished, backing up the next one etc. Is there any backup software that can act differently? I have also heard the term 'streaming backup' knocked around, but not sure what streaming is and what other types there are. Thanks in advance.

You may have to update your backup product to support Exchange 2007, as the backup method has changed very slightly. However at its core, the backup is the same. You select the information store in the backup software, it backs up each database. In the event of a recovery you restore the required backup to a recovery storage group. All Exchange aware backup products work in the same way because they are all using the same API for backup. I wouldn't recommend trying to backup multiple databases at the same time on the server because it will give you no performance gains - it could actually makes things slower unless you have everything on separate arrays. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources

Try to design your storage architecture for furhter gains you can have with exchange 2007. As if you are trying for any HA solutions , which will allow you to do a backup of passive db ( LCC,CCR.SCR). Also vSS would be helpful as more storage groups having single db + disks on different SPINDLES would boost performance. Also Important point to consider as Simon has mentioned and not recommended. ( backing up multiple db's at the same time).

You may want to look into updating to a VSS based backup solution. Here is a post on the Symantec site that may be of help http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/vss-vs-streaming-backup-performance Troy Werelius www.Lucid8.com