Mimosa Systems has announced version 3.0 of its NearPoint
email archiving software, an update that includes a
parallel-processing architecture for increased scalability, Active
Directory integration, support for Exchange public folders and a
new
disaster recovery option.
"The rule of thumb for us is that a single [NearPoint] node has
been able to support around 5,000 users," said T.M. Ravi, founder
and CEO of Mimosa. The new architecture, in which the software's
archiving ingestion engine can be federated over an unlimited
number of commodity servers, will allow the NearPoint system to
scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes, Ravi claimed.
One large scale Mimosa user, Andrew Gahm, network architect for
Virtua Health, said the scalability enhancements will be useful not
just to support more mailboxes but for search and retrieval
purposes. Virtua has close to 9,000 Exchange mailboxes in multiple
mail stores, and according to Gahm, there is a delay between
ingestion of Exchange data into the archive and its searchability
using Mimosa's underlying database.
"Mail stores haven't been indexed as fast as I would have liked
sometimes," Gahm said, estimating that in a mail store with between
500 and 1,000 users, the system would take an hour to two hours to
index messages. In the larger mail stores with between 3,000 and
5,000 users, he said, indexing could sometimes take between 12 and
24 hours.
"I'm anxious to see what we can do with [the new grid system],"
he said.
"Scalability has been a concern for some people [with email
archiving systems]," said Brian Babineau, analyst with the
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "In many cases it's also a
limitation of the messaging system," for example, Exchange 2003's
well known scalability problems. These are being addressed with a
64-bit operating system in the upcoming 2007 version.
However, when asked what he considered the standout addition to
the announcement, Gahm didn't hesitate before mentioning the new
.pst crawler Mimosa is adding to NearPoint. The crawler searches
file shares on the network for .pst files that traditionally
Exchange users have used for archiving old messages, indexes and
archives them, and notifies the administrator where the files have
been located, with the option of deleting them from file shares
once they're moved to the Mimosa archive.
"We have around 300 GB of .pst files which are not only taking
up space on our file shares but also being backed up every night
and on the weekends," Gahm said. The ability to centralize .pst
storage will free up one-third of the company's shared file space,
he estimated.
Moreover, the ability to pull .pst files into the Mimosa archive
will mean he can roll the Mimosa search and restore function out to
more users. "I haven't wanted to give everyone access to the
archive search if it meant I'd have to train them to import their
.pst files -- now I can just say 'stop using them,' which will make
rollout a lot easier."
Furthermore, Gahm said the support for archiving .pst files is
the first step toward file system archiving from Mimosa, something
the company has said will become available in the second half of
this year, and something Gahm said he's been eagerly awaiting.
Features and futures: Active Directory, disaster recovery and
SaaS?
The upgrade adds integration with Active Directory throughout
the archiving interface. The software will now "inherit" individual
and group identities from the company's existing Active Directory
structure and will also archive version histories and access logs
on Exchange data based on Active Directory.
Babineau pointed out that this integration will have e-discovery
implications for many users, especially since Mimosa archives
calendar and contact information in addition to email messages.
"You can see not only messages but when meetings were scheduled
between two parties and put that together into a wider context with
a timeline, which is something attorneys love."
Gahm said he was appreciative of the new integration.
"Previously, when working with the archive, the only way to select
mailboxes for e-discovery was by individual or by the entire mail
store. If I wanted to select by department, I'd have to go one at a
time working from a list."
He added that support for public folders would also save him
time when it comes to disaster recovery. Virtua is currently using
Mimosa's software running on a Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) All-in-One
(AiO) server to replicate between an EMC Corp. Clariion CX700 SAN
and a 4.5 TB HP MSA 1000 at a remote site. In the past, since the
Mimosa software didn't see public folder information, including
distribution lists, "that data would just be lost in a disaster
scenario," according to Gahm.
Mimosa has also added a new disaster recovery option that
replicates Exchange server state information to a "warm" server at
a secondary site for failover. Previously, users had to replicate
from storage area network (SAN) to SAN and restore the files to an
Exchange server manually, according to Ravi. Finally, the new
software will support Microsoft's Live Communication Server for
instant messaging.
According to Laura DuBois, research director for storage
software for IDC, this update could represent a move into new
markets for Mimosa, as well as improved features for its users.
"Grid is going to position them for a [Software as a Service] SaaS,
multitenancy, highly scalable deployment [which] allows for a
community of commodity servers to scale to carrier class 100,000
mailbox environments," DuBois wrote to SearchStorage.com in an
email. "Here they are going against Zantaz [Inc.'s] business."
Mimosa is also branching further into disaster recovery, DuBois
noted. "Email is the new business critical app, [but] firms solve
[the disaster recovery and archiving] problems in different ways
today -- one solution for DR and another solution for email
archive," she wrote. "Mimosa is proposing one solution for both
problems."
However, there's still room for further expansion, according to
Babineau. In addition to the long-awaited file and SharePoint
archiving, Babineau said he would like to see Mimosa add support
for Lotus Notes, rather than focusing primarily on Exchange.
"They haven't done it yet, but it wouldn't be hard to get
there," he said, since Mimosa works at the message-log level rather
than journaling, which is also how Lotus Notes functions. "They can
add Lotus support without having to change their underlying
architecture."
Get a quote for your next
Email Archiving
solution