Mimosa Minds E-Mail

Two companies are drinking to the health of their Exchange Server message stores, thanks to technology from Mimosa Systems.

Message stores growing by leaps and bounds were keeping the Microsoft Exchange Servers at Dot Foods and the law offices of Kirton & McConkie from running at full efficiency. Enter Mimosa Systems, whose NearPoint 2.0 archive solution has helped these organizations tame the e-mail beast.

Click here to read a review of Mimosa Systems NearPoint 2.0.

Since its initial product release last year, Mimosa Systems has seen its client base grow to 100. eWEEK Labs interviewed IT managers at two of these customer sites to gauge the effectiveness of NearPoint 2.0 under real-word conditions.

IT staffers at Salt Lake City-based Kirton & McConkie implemented NearPoint 2.0 to import and index stray PST (personal storage table) files and to free the companys primary Exchange Server system from the burden of storing bulky attachments and old messages. Kirton & McConkie staff also beta tested NearPoint 2.0s eDiscovery option and found it to be valuable in their day-to-day work.

"We have had a couple of instances where we had to go back to check through secretaries and lawyers e-mail boxes," said Joel Woodall, systems administrator at Kirton & McConkie. "Instead of taking weeks to look for associated messages, we can do it in a couple of minutes [with NearPoints eDiscovery]."

One of the main reasons why Kirton & McConkie implemented NearPoint was for the products ability to centralize e-mail data within the archive, said Woodall. "Before we implemented NearPoint, people had a large number of PST files, which made it difficult to find data," he said. "With NearPoints ability to import and index PST files, it has now become easier for Kirton & McConkie employees to run searches."

Kirton & McConkies IT staff also appreciate NearPoints ability to slim down Exchange Server databases—in the law firms case, from 130GB to 30GB.

Kirton & McConkie runs NearPoint 2.0 on a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL380 G4.

Food for Thought

Dot Foods, based in Mt. Sterling, Ill., is one of the United States first food redistributors, linking industry manufacturers, distributors, brokers and buying groups. Dot Foods offers 57,000 dry, frozen and refrigerated products, plus equipment and supplies, to local distributors in all 50 states.

High-speed e-mail recovery was the core capability Dot Foods was looking for—and found—in NearPoint.

In fact, in the middle of Dot Foods evaluation of NearPoint 2.0, an employee accidentally deleted an important e-mail message folder. Using NearPoint, Dot Foods Network Manager Eric Ellerman was able to restore the deleted folder in a matter of minutes. Ellerman said he could have restored the folder using Dot Foods implementation of CommVaults QiNetix 6.1 tape backup system, but the job would have taken hours, as opposed to minutes with NearPoint.

Like Kirton & McConkie, Dot Foods imports PST files into its NearPoint archive implementation. Ellerman gives users the choice of either importing PST files on their own or letting Dot Foods administrators facilitate the process. NearPoint 2.0s flexibility in this area is key to meeting the needs of Dot Foods various clients (some of which are more sensitive about data access than others).

Dot Foods runs NearPoint 2.0 on an HP BL25P blade server, which gets its storage from an HP StorageWorks EVA (Enterprise Virtual Array) 5000 Fibre Channel storage system.

Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at henry_baltazar@ziffdavis.com.

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