EDC Standardizes on Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems announced that EDC, a global non-profit organization, has standardized on Mimosa NearPoint as its unified email archiving solution of choice. After deploying NearPoint, EDC has been able to reduce email production storage requirements for its Exchange message stores by 60 percent while enabling self-service search and discovery capabilities for its mix of Mac and PC users.

EDC is a non-profit organization that designs, delivers and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic opportunity. Working with public-sector and private partners, EDC harnesses the power of people and systems to improve education, health promotion and care, workforce preparation, communications technologies, and civic engagement.

Currently, EDC is conducting 350 projects in 35 countries. These programs include the research, training and education needed to build the knowledge and skills that make possible a deeper understanding of the world, and engage learners as active, problem-solving participants. To support its programs, EDC employees and partners around the world communicate primarily through email. Yet, as the organization’s global base expands, EDC’s Exchange 2007 email infrastructure has seen exponential growth. Because the organization retains all email records, its email system was causing a significant resource drain.

"Not only are our global teams dispersed, much of our U.S. based team telecommutes so we were continuing to face the challenges of PST sprawl, which made it very difficult to find and manage email records," said Katy Cassidy, systems administrator, EDC. "In addition, our Exchange server was taking a serious hit on performance and we were continuously in need of added capacity, which made email management both expensive and complicated."

To solve its email management challenges, EDC selected Mimosa NearPoint to centralize the organization’s email content into an integrated archive. As a result, EDC has optimized its Exchange server performance by moving older content to the Mimosa archive residing on more cost-effective secondary storage.

"NearPoint gave us a unified archive without using journaling so that it wouldn’t put any strain on the performance of our production Exchange server," added Cassidy. "It also reduced our Exchange message stores from 2TB to 800GB, eliminating the need to buy additional tier one storage. It has also been very intuitive for our users to operate. They can now easily search and recover their own emails, reducing their reliance on our IT team."

For EDC, key benefits of NearPoint include:

• Next-Generation Architecture: Mimosa NearPoint’s unique architecture does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange server or user desktops. This ‘zero footprint’ architecture ensures that there is no impact on production Exchange server performance.
• Storage Management and PST Archiving: Using NearPoint, EDC’s Exchange administrator defines policies that allow mailboxes on Exchange servers to be extended to the NearPoint server using parameters such as message size, age, and mailbox quota. This has reduced production mail storage requirements by 60 percent. For managing offline email contained in PST files, the NearPoint PST Archiving Option crawls and uploads PST files to the NearPoint archive, where they are centrally managed and searched for email discovery.
• Self-service Search of Archived Data: EDC employees have seamless self-service access to their archived data, enabling them to find potentially lost or deleted messages without IT assistance.

"NearPoint continues to be the solution of choice for organizations, like EDC, that struggle with fast-growing email volume," said Scott Whitney, vice president product management of Mimosa Systems. "Through a combination of our unique ‘zero footprint’ architecture, advanced storage management features and end user transparency, NearPoint delivers the unified email archiving solution organizations need to eliminate the complexity of both managing and archiving Exchange information."