It is important to dedicate recovery hardware. If you have a dedicated recovery server at each location, you can install Microsoft Exchange Server before a recovery is necessary, greatly reducing recovery time.
Dedicating recovery hardware might also be less expensive. Using the ESEUTIL troubleshooting utility to recover and defragment a database requires up to twice the disk space of the information store database on the largest production server. Thus, it might be more cost effective for an organization to maintain a single recovery server that has sufficient disk space rather than equipping all production servers with sufficient disk space to perform a recovery.
If you decide to dedicate recovery equipment, do not allow that equipment to become production equipment without replacing it. Make sure recovery equipment is always in working order and is available at a moment's notice. Some companies purchase recovery equipment, but then install test only software. They become dependent on this equipment for production use. In short, keep recovery equipment in dedicated recovery mode.
If the recovery server will be shared among sites, maintain a copy of the Windows NT installation code and Service Pack on the hard drive of the recovery computer. By doing so you can install Microsoft Exchange Server based on the required site and organization without having the paths for this Microsoft Exchange Server installation match the paths of the production Microsoft Exchange Server being recovered. For information on settings for protocol addresses, partitioning information, protocols, options, tuning, and other options, see your production Windows NT Server configuration data.