Bowdoin College Deploys Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that Bowdoin College, an independent undergraduate liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, has selected Mimosa NearPoint for the unified email retention, eDiscovery, storage optimization and end-user search efficiency of its Mac and PC-based Exchange mailboxes. Using NearPoint, Bowdoin College has reduced its overall Exchange storage requirements by 50 percent while benefiting from automated disaster recovery, out of the box.

Bowdoin College is a highly selective liberal arts college located in Brunswick, Maine, about 25 miles north of Portland. One of the oldest colleges in the nation, it received its charter in 1794.

Three years after implementing Exchange 2003, Bowdoin College found itself facing exponential email data growth. The college’s Exchange server storage grew from 150GB to 2TB and backup and recovery times were becoming literally unmanageable. It could take up to two days to recover a database and the performance impacts of a backup were unacceptable. With these challenges in mind, Bowdoin Systems Engineer, Mike Bowden, and the systems team began to search for an email archiving solution that would bring Exchange storage management under control.

Beyond solving the college’s storage management challenges, Bowden was also tasked by the CIO to transition its paper based archive to an intelligent electronic archive repository. It was also important to find an email archiving solution that would completely support a 50/50 mix of Mac and PC systems that now run on Exchange 2007 while also giving the institution’s staff the ability to perform rapid search of permanent records for eDiscovery and transparency requests. Because the archive would be used to archive email on business records for its human resources, student body and business offices, the College needed a solution that could perform discovery on student records and employees in the case of an eDiscovery event.

"We wanted an email archiving solution for Exchange that would automatically remove Exchange content and eliminate our performance bottlenecks," said Bowden. "We also needed an email archive that would streamline any requests we get for discovery, which before could take us days to perform. Now with NearPoint we can search the archive in just minutes. NearPoint’s search features are just amazing and the ability to search and restore data is easy."

Bowdoin College selected NearPoint after evaluating alternative solutions from EMC and Symantec. Mimosa gave Bowdoin the storage management, eDiscovery and disaster recovery advantages it needed with an agentless architecture that didn’t rely on journaling that might impact production Exchange server performance.

Specific NearPoint features important to Bowdoin College include:

• Powerful eDiscovery: NearPoint streamlines eDiscovery and lowers discovery costs with advanced search capabilities. This ensures compliance and features 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, Bowdoin College is reducing the storage requirements on its Exchange server by 50 percent by migrating or extending attachments based on policies of age, document size, or mailbox size.
• Integrated recovery and disaster recovery: NearPoint reduces Bowdoin College’s IT costs with end-user self-service restoration available with a single click. Email downtime risk has also been reduced through NearPoint’s shadow copy backup which can effortlessly restore Exchange service.

"NearPoint delivers valuable results in the multiple areas – including storage management, disaster recovery and eDiscovery – that challenge organizations of all sizes," said T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa Systems. "Yet for institutions like Bowdoin College, this value is transcended by the relief they feel in knowing that critical operational data is safely and securely retained and quickly and easily recovered whenever it may be required."