Metrolina Greenhouses Standardizes on Mimosa Archiving Solution

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that Metrolina Greenhouses has deployed the next-generation Mimosa NearPoint content archiving solution for rapid information discovery, retention, protection, and recovery of its vital email data.

With 160 acres of heated greenhouses, the Huntersville, NC–based wholesale plant company maintains the largest automated single-site heated greenhouse facility in the world. The firm’s total site capacity—including planted annuals and hanging plants—is 325 acres. Now 35 years old, Metrolina distributes all along the East Coast, from New York to Florida, supplying a broad range of flowering plants to such retail giants as Loew’s and Wal-Mart, and employs 800 people, a 100 percent increase in employment since 2000.

The company’s rapid expansion has spurred growth in its email volume to a hefty 30 percent per year, with email boxes averaging six gigabytes. Metrolina is hardly alone in dealing with this kind of exponential growth of data. According to IDC’s Digital Universe study, the amount of data stored has grown fifty-fold in the past three years. Businesses are turning more and more data into useful information, and that trend, combined with increased regulatory and legal accountability, has compounded the problem of how to store, manage, archive, and ensure the safety and security of all this data.

“The size of our users’ email boxes had gotten out of control. We had no intelligent way for end users to search and recover email. So user requests got filtered to IT, diverting IT from critical-path activities,” said, AJ Klum, network operations manager, Metrolina Greenhouses. “This was seriously threatening our ability to do business; email is a critical application for a number of transactions, including contracts and customer orders. Many days we close $2 million in business and we absolutely can’t go down. We needed to create a robust, redundant environment to archive emails and provide one-click disaster recovery, so our 24×7 operations are not jeopardized.”

Mimosa Nearpoint Creates Bulletproof Email Environment
Metrolina Greenhouses chose Mimosa NearPoint because of its next-generation approach to archiving Microsoft® Exchange 2007 email information, along with its ease of installation and one-click recovery. “We didn’t have to bring the system down for one minute. From taking the servers out of the box to installing the software, we were in business in less than four hours; it was the easiest installation I can remember,” said Klum. “We now have a bulletproof email exchange and archive messaging environment because of Mimosa. The NearPoint modular platform allows turnkey operations for integrated content archiving, in-place retention management, end-user search, and protection of one of our most valuable resources—our email. With seamless backup and disaster recovery, we know we can keep operations running smoothly. I finally feel secure that we won’t go down, so I sleep better at night.”

Key Mimosa NearPoint features that were particularly important to Metrolina Greenhouses include:

• Continuous Data Protection: Mimosa NearPoint copies the Exchange database and stores it on the NearPoint server. NearPoint continuously updates these copies with transaction log data without impacting the Exchange Server using a process called One Pass Protection™. With One Pass Protection, all valuable Exchange email information is protected. In the event of a catastrophic database failure, or if a single mailbox or message is deleted by mistake, NearPoint performs fast, reliable recovery with zero data loss.
• Continuous Capture and Archiving of Exchange Data: NearPoint archiving includes all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks to quickly identify relevant content as part of an eDiscovery or disclosure request, without the use of Exchange agents or journaling infrastructure.
• Automated Exchange Storage Management: Mimosa NearPoint has reduced the company’s storage requirements by moving Exchange content, based on policies of age and size, to the NearPoint server. The NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature allows Metrolina’s IT staff to define policies that create stub attachments in Exchange, while still giving users seamless access to their email.
• Simple ‘One-Click’ Recovery: Mimosa NearPoint gives Metrolina complete disaster recovery of Exchange data to the primary Exchange Server using the base NearPoint product or to a standby Exchange Server using the Mimosa NearPoint Disaster Recovery Option. Either way, administrators enjoy the speed of recovering an entire Exchange database at disk-to-disk speeds with simple ‘point-and-click’ operations. To assist with rapid disaster recovery, Metrolina administrators use NearPoint to define disaster failover policies that automate the entire failover process.

“NearPoint is the only real choice on the market today for a company, like Metrolina, that needs to be absolutely, positively sure its Exchange environment won’t go down,” said Scott Whitney, vice president of product management, Mimosa Systems. “Companies that depend so heavily on email data need a fail-safe system that won’t let them down. That’s what our one-click recovery functionality is all about.”