Exchange 2010 auto responders

we have an email account for our support department that needs to send back an auto response back when emailed. Basically a quick "thank you for contacting support our business hours are" ect.

Is there a way to do this server side or would we need to be

There's nothing built into Exchange that will do this for you. You're going to have to use a third party app. Look into Email2DB. It's pretty common for applications like this.

The easiest way would be to create the account, then add an auto-reply server-side rule to it through the Outlook Webapp or Exchange Control Panel interface.