Liverpool John Moores University Deploys Mimosa NearPoint

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), the 10th largest UK University, has deployed Mimosa Systems’ NearPoint to eliminate mailbox quotas and provide unlimited mailbox capacity for its 3,000 staff and 28,500 students.

NearPoint will provide LJMU with a single archive platform to capture all Microsoft Exchange data and files for storage optimisation, recovery and compliance. The solution does not rely on SMTP, MAPI, or Microsoft Exchange Journaling to gather messages to archive, instead it uses a process called Continuous Application Shadowing to capture Exchange log files the instant they are committed to disk and stores them ‘off-host’ on NearPoint. All email content, including attachments and Exchange data extracted from the log files, is indexed and stored once using single-instancing to optimise storage.

“Implementing NearPoint will reduce the data held on Exchange by 75 percent and also facilitate our planned migration to Exchange 2007,” comments Kevin Walsh, Technical Director “We will be able to move our storage onto lower cost options and dramatically reduce our back times.” Walsh explains, “We had imposed mailbox quotas to maintain a stable Exchange environment which was extremely restrictive for our users. As 80 percent of email is over 30 days old and referenced infrequently, we wanted to be able to move it onto less expensive storage, but still enable our users to access it quickly and easily, on-demand.” From an IT perspective it was also important to substantially reduce back-up times and, if possible, cut out the need for tape back-up.

NearPoint captures complete Exchange mailbox information, as well as email stored offline in PST files and all email content found in public folders – a major advantage for complete Exchange recovery at all levels This includes full database recovery, mailbox recovery, and individual message restores. Exchange administrators can perform database and mailbox recoveries using the NearPoint administrator console, while individual message restores can be carried out by any user.

“When disaster strikes, one click is all it takes to initiate a complete Exchange failover,” comments Kevin Walsh. “The Disaster Recovery capability is a massive bonus and is easy to deploy, as it comes as one of the standard product options.”

Furthermore it was vital that the chosen email archiving solution was completely transparent to users. Walsh says: “It would be virtually impossible deploy agents to 24,000 student home PCs so it was important to us that NearPoint did not require any software agents to be installed on either the Exchange servers or the desktops, making implementation simple and quick”. Users will be able to search and retrieve emails through their familiar Outlook interface without any training."