Building a better e-mail archiving system
A large, national homebuilding company has deployed an e-mail archiving system from Mimosa Systems to improve the overall efficiency of its e-mail system and to help comply with regulations.
Brookfield Homes has implemented the Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail archiving solution to streamline its e-mail processes. It initially deployed the system to comply with several government mandates, including Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires retention of e-mail for five years. Additionally, the company wanted a solution that would help reduce e-mail storage overall, as well as the time required to back up the e-mail system.
“For preserving e-mail and managing it with retention policies, the native features of Microsoft Exchange were not enough,” says Chris Formes, IT manager at Brookfield Homes. “Mimosa NearPoint allows us to archive e-mail for compliance for all employees without requiring Exchange journaling. The solution eliminated the need to re-provision production Exchange systems with additional CPU, memory and storage, which is required by first-generation journaling-based archiving solutions."
In a press release, Mimosa Systems reports that prior to deploying the new system, Brookfield Homes had to perform full backups of its e-mail system daily, with completion times exceeding the backup window. The company also performed brick-level backups, a specialized form of Exchange backup geared for individual mailbox and message level recovery, which took more than 40 hours to complete, according to Mimosa.
“As a result of deploying the solution, which took less than one day, we have eliminated brick-level backups altogether,” says Formes. “Using NearPoint’s Mailbox Extension feature with just a two-year limit setting, we have initially reduced overall storage of our production Exchange server by 25 percent. In the future, we plan on reducing the time period limit for archiving e-mails to a more aggressive 12-month period, which we expect will further reclaim storage capacity, while also reducing the time to complete full backups to less than two hours.”