Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange

Next-Generation Email Archiving

The fast-growing volume of email presents major challenges for all organizations. According to Ferris Research, the average information worker sends over 600 emails in a given week. Many of these emails are either business records or contain valuable corporate knowledge and need to be retained accordingly. Keeping a large volume of email leads to higher storage costs and headaches for IT staff in the form of longer back-up windows. In fact, Osterman Research states, message stores have grown 30% from winter 2007 to winter 2008. As message stores grow, organizations face challenges with:

• Managing Storage Costs – getting content off expensive production systems 
• Timely Recovery Times – reducing recovery point objectives and ever-expanding back-up windows 
• Ending eDiscovery Firefights – lowering cost of reactive collection and review 
• Mitigating Content-related Risks – ensuring proper usage of content within the organization 

NearPoint Continuous Application Shadowing™ 

First-generation archiving solutions place heavy burdens on Exchange servers, relying on data capture methods like MAPI crawls and journaling – both of which can increase input/output per second (IOPS) on the Exchange server by up to 50 percent to archive the complete data store.

Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange has incorporated an innovative data capture approach called Continuous Application Shadowing™ where Exchange log files are captured the instant they are committed to disk and stores them “off-host” on NearPoint. Continuous Application Shadowing is an application-intelligent process that blocks corruption from the backup copy. All email content extracted from the log files is indexed and stored with single-instance storage. Continuous Application Shadowing also captures the complete Exchange mailbox information, including contacts, calendars, personal folders, as well as email stored offline in PST files and all email content found in public folders — a major advantage for eDiscovery and Exchange recovery.

Continuous Application Shadowing can optionally leverage Volume Shadow-copy Service (VSS) capture improving log shipping performance by 10x over Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), when applying Exchange logs. Additionally, with an Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication environment NearPoint can read from the passive node eliminating any load on the active node

NearPoint MAPI Capture

NearPoint also supports capture of mailboxes that are either local to the NearPoint server or geographically dispersed. In these scenarios, customers can leverage NearPoint's MAPI archiving to capture only specific mailboxes eliminating the need to shadow Exchange. With this approach, it is also possible to specify exclusion criteria to further exclude certain message classes or folders from those mailboxes for even more selective archiving.

MAPI archiving and Continuous Application Shadowing can co-exist in a complementary manner, for example if an organization has a mix of local and remote Exchange servers, Continuous Application Shadowing can capture from the local servers while MAPI archiving captures from remote servers.

A Next-Generation Approach to Email Archiving 

Existing archiving solutions place heavy burdens on Exchange servers, relying on data capture methods like MAPI crawls and journaling – both of which can increase input/output per second (IOPS) on the Exchange server by up to 50%. Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange incorporates an innovative data capture method called Continuous Application Shadowing™. Continuous Application Shadowing instantly captures Exchange log files once they are committed to disk and stores them “off-host” on NearPoint. It is an application-intelligent process, which also blocks corruption from the back-up copy. All email content extracted from the log files is indexed and stored with single-instance storage. Furthermore, Continuous Application Shadowing captures complete mailbox information including calendar items, tasks, contacts, and item histories.

Mimosa NearPoint™ then uses a method called Smart Message Extraction to process Exchange message data for archiving. Smart Message Extraction runs entirely on the NearPoint server and places no burden on Exchange. Each time transaction log files are received on NearPoint and applied to the full database replica, Smart Message Extraction automatically runs and processes the data for archival. The Smart Message Extraction process:

• Breaks each individual message into its major components − header, body and attachment 
• Each component is indexed and deduplicated 
•  All email metadata is preserved, e.g. context information for folders, permissions, flags and rich text and it includes a record if the message was opened, edited, replied, forwarded or deleted. 

Since many of us want to keep important emails for reference and knowledge purposes, it’s become critical for archiving solutions to easily offer quick access to those messages. With NearPoint, users have multiple ways to access messages. You choose − turn on “message extension” or stubbing for access to messages in the Outlook client, or seamlessly access Outlook, without stubbing, as shown below:

Mimosa NearPoint: Features and Benefits

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