Sure, hosted archiving (or even tape backup) can do the job for a small business customer who doesn't go to court often. But if you start offering service to large corporations, you'll need a system that saves the entire Exchange database and can deliver exactly what you want in minutes, not hours.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 19, 2008]

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems was founded about five years ago and shipped its first product in 2005. "We focus primarily on on-premises Exchange backup," says Scott Whitney, vice president of marketing at Mimosa, "although we can also do hosted."

We've all heard about the problem that administrators face today: you need to impose mailbox size limits, but when you do so, archiving goes "underground" as employees start saving mail to .pst files (if you're in a Microsoft environment).

Whitney says that the answer is to take the archive out of Exchange and put it into a separate, more scalable database. Mimosa's database is called NearPoint and although it is connected directly to the Exchange server, the architecture allows it to have no footprint there. Instead, it duplicates the Exchange database and everything in it—yes, that means not just e-mail but also the calendar and everything else that's on Exchange.

"A 2 GB mailbox is pushing the limit of Exchange," says Whitney. "So NearPoiint takes the content out of Exchange and moves it into an archive and places a 'stub' or search facility into the archive."

All of this was a problem a few years ago, but it's more urgent now. The financial industry faces scrutiny about conflicts of interest. Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow litigants to request information from the other side's e-mail and other digital data. Companies are required to preserve the data and to be able to produce it.

Recovery
Whitney says that companies that are regularly involved in such litigation (generally, financial companies or those involved in environmental law) are now paying attention not just to the cost of storage but also to the "cost of review."

"If I've got an attorney making a thousand dollars an hour reviewing lots of e-mail, that's a lot of much each day. Our search technology is very expressive. We can cull down. I can search for everything from Alex in March of 2006, and then further refine it to ten e-mails regarding 'wrongful termination.' Customers want precision. I can get all of Alex's e-mail, but I want to chop that workload down so that when I give it to outside counsel, they have a few dozen e-mails, not a few thousand to review."

NearPoint stores everything that happens in Exchange, in real time. That means that if someone accidentally destroys important information, you can recover it. "Let's say I just got an iPhone and I'm really excited, and I sync it up with my work e-mail, but I accidentally do a reverse sync, and blow out my mailbox. Now I see only 'welcome to the Apple iPhone.' If I don't have Mimosa, then my only approach is to go to backup tapes and reapply the incrementals. And if it's daily backups, I've lost everything I did today. If it's been some time since the last weekly backup, it could take four hours. Some IT guys we talk to spend 15 percent of their time doing this."

NearPoint can also crawl through a storage archive and add saved .pst files to the archive. It can automatically delete those files, or leave them in the archive.

In all cases, end users retain access to e-mail, but they get to the archive through the NearPoint "stub" that they see in their Outlook client.

The uncertain future
The driver for this product, upgraded storage with an impressive search feature, is litigation. As this round table from a year ago shows (The New Federal Rules on E-Discovery: The First 180 Days) the rules are new for everyone. Lawyers are not yet taking full advantage of them. Some may understand that they can obtain e-mail, but may not look for spreadsheet or other files.

As lawyers learn they can demand the full calendar, in native format, plus e-mails and attachments, it will become much more difficult to deliver what big businesses need. You'll need a system like Mimosa's.

So far, Mimosa has few customers offering the software as a service within a data center or hosted Exchange environment. A recent CLEC customer win, One Communications, is about the CLEC using the system to track its 2,400 employees.

Whitney says that although the system is focused on delivering a scalable project to demanding customers such as oil companies and major financial firms, a hosted product will soon deliver these features to an ISP's smaller customers too.

—End