Mimosa Chosen by First Industrial Realty Trust

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that First Industrial Realty Trust reports that Mimosa NearPoint, has proven an invaluable tool for eDiscovery, business continuity and ‘one-click’ disaster recovery in a single solution. The company has dramatically reduced the eDiscovery process and eliminated storage capacity limitations and data management expenses.

First Industrial Realty Trust, Inc.

With headquarters in Chicago and offices serving more than 30 markets throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, First Industrial Realty Trust, Inc. is a provider of industrial real estate supply chain solutions. First Industrial leases, develops, redevelops, buys, sells and manages industrial facilities. The company owns, manages, and has under development more than 100 million square feet of industrial space, including facilities in major sea and inland port markets near intermodal facilities and transportation hubs.

Addressing Exchange storage management challenges was First Industrial’s initial objective in seeking an email archiving vendor. The short-term solution of offloading PST files presented its own management challenges, and the company soon began to search out a more effective solution.

"We had performance problems because our data volumes were reaching capacity and straining the limits of the Exchange database," said Nick Colakovic, Director of IT, First Industrial Realty Trust. "Our helpdesk was dealing with daily issues that often took up to a half-day to resolve for a single user request. This siphoned resources away from more strategic projects and issues."

Colakovic’s department found a 20 to 30 percent performance impact when it tested traditional legacy archive vendor solutions, and these products were unable to offer eDiscovery or disaster recovery options in a single solution. "Mimosa impressed us because they had everything under the hood including eDiscovery, Exchange storage optimization and ‘one-click’ rapid recovery," Colakovic said.

First Industrial ultimately opted for the Mimosa NearPoint content archiving solution and found the installation fast and easy. According to Colakovic, no client software had to be installed and it was unnecessary to take the system down, so there was no impact on end-user performance.

"We’ve been using NearPoint for two years now and think of Mimosa as our Swiss Army knife, providing us with all the tools necessary to do discovery, storage optimization, granular item recovery and disaster recovery in a single solution. We have more than 30 satellite offices to support and we have rapidly grown our company’s infrastructure, including adding offices internationally. We are confident that Mimosa’s grid architecture will play an important role as we continue to expand," Colakovic said.

Key Mimosa NearPoint features that were particularly important to First Industrial include:

• Continuous Capture and Archiving of Exchange Data: including all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, tasks to quickly identify relevant content as part of a discovery or disclosure request.
• Automated Exchange Storage Management: Mimosa NearPoint reduces storage requirements by moving attachments, based on policies of age and size, to the NearPoint server. The NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature allows First Industrial’s IT staff to define policies that stub attachments in Exchange while still giving users seamless access to the email.
• Simple ‘One-Click’ Recovery: Mimosa NearPoint gives First Industrial continuous protection of all its Exchange information. NearPoint preserves all Exchange information disk and allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook and allows administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with simple ‘one-click’ operations.

"We are pleased that Mimosa NearPoint continues to provide strong value to address all of First Industrial Realty Trust’s content requirements, in a highly scalable, easy to manage, unified solution," said T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa Systems. "In today’s complex, multi-site, multinational data environments we continue to demonstrate that our products provide major productivity and cost advantages."