Chichester School District Prepares for eDiscovery With Mimosa Content Archive

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that the Mimosa NearPoint next-generation content archiving solution has been selected by Chichester School District to help them prepare for eDiscovery while supporting their email management, disaster recovery and record retention requirements.

With 4,000 K-12 students supported by a staff of 700, the Chichester School District in Boothwyn, Pa. has a mission to educate students by wisely managing finite resources. To support their mission and beliefs, Chichester School District places high importance on the efficiency of its IT infrastructure. Designed to support email, financial applications, student management applications, and a parent portal website based on Microsoft SharePoint, Chichester’s IT infrastructure is the core of its educational operations.

To run its infrastructure, the school district has 40 servers, a HP Procurve backbone and a NetApp StoreVault SAN designed to support its data backup applications. Yet, the district still found that it needed a more comprehensive solution to better safeguard its email content while enabling simplified eDiscovery in support of new regulations required by the U.S. Department of State Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

"We found that eDiscovery requests could bury our IT staff for up to two weeks," said Tim McGrath, senior network administrator, Chichester School District. "We had to restore old Exchange backups from tape in order to search for requested information. The process was like finding a needle in a haystack – with no guarantee we would find what was needed."

Chichester’s Exchange archiving needs went beyond eDiscovery. The school district was experiencing a 35 percent growth rate in email volume. To deal with the increasing data volume Chichester instituted Exchange mailbox quotas making it difficult for users to retain the data they wanted to keep.

"We needed an archiving solution that would not only simplify our eDiscovery process," added Tim McGrath, "we also needed to free our users from mailbox limit constraints and reduce our overall storage needs. Mimosa NearPoint was the only solution we evaluated that could deliver it all in one comprehensive solution without impacting the performance of our Exchange server. Plus, it integrated seamlessly with our NetApp storage solution."

After evaluating Symantec, CommVault and Proofpoint, Chichester School District selected Mimosa NearPoint because it offered the following:

• Next-Generation Architecture: Mimosa NearPoint’s unique architecture does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange Server or user desktops. This will simplify Chichester School District’s deployment and ensures that there is no impact on production Exchange Server performance.
• Efficient and Comprehensive eDiscovery: Mimosa NearPoint offers several features to expedite Chichester’s eDiscovery process by leveraging complete content capture including individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search – while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the workflow.
• Mailbox storage management: With NearPoint, Chichester has reduced storage requirements on its Exchange Server by nearly half by migrating or extending attachments based on policies of age, document size, or mailbox size.
• Automated, Application Intelligent Disaster Recovery: NearPoint reliably protects Chichester’s Exchange information through non-invasive, continuous application shadowing. This preserves the consistency and integrity of Exchange data, and enables ‘one-click’ full email data and service recovery when needed.
• Turnkey Deployment and Support Services: Mimosa NearPoint’s ease of implementation and expert support services had the Chichester School District up and running within two days and with just two phone calls.

"By delivering all of the archiving, eDiscovery, disaster recovery and storage management capabilities Chichester needs in a single solution, NearPoint helps to support their mission to wisely manage finite resources," said Scott Whitney, vice president, product management, Mimosa Systems. "We are pleased to enable resource-constrained public school districts like Chichester better protect, manage and recover their critical content with Mimosa’s integrated archiving solution."