Fave raves

By Sandra Gittlen, Network World, 02/27/06

Mimosa Systems' NearPoint Server

IN THIS ARTICLE

CIO, Priceline: Primavera
IT director, University of Connecticut: Enterprise Policy Manager
IT director, Lucasfilm Entertainment: Remedy Help Desk
IT director, Costello & Sons Insurance: Mimosa NearPoint Server
IT director, Pentair: WebInspect

We're a paperless office, so we depend heavily on our e-mail system in all three of our [California] locations - San Rafael, Irvine and Santa Barbara. All of the transactions that take place over e-mail need to have some kind of digital backup. We have a large Microsoft Exchange environment, and there are a lot of messages with important attachments.

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Steve Perry
• Title: IT director, Costello & Sons Insurance, in San Rafael, Calif.
• Years in networking: 22
“Thirty minutes later, I have my system back up and running.”

Mimosa NearPoint Server does three things for us: It backs up Exchange in real time; it provides continuous data protection for our e-mail system; and it provides a failover for the Exchange server. If you've ever worked with Exchange, you know these are all critical features.

Before, if someone made a mistake on Exchange, we used to have to restore it from tape, and that would take a day and a half just to get the e-mail system back on its feet. The company would come to a grinding halt. Microsoft never invented a way to have a warm backup for Exchange. Now, if my Exchange server crashes, I can go to the NearPoint Server and click "restore." Thirty minutes later, I have my system back up and running. At most we might have lost an hour of productivity from the time of the last snapshot to complete restoration. I've done a lot of Exchange recoveries in my time, and you're lucky if you lose less than a day typically.

I can also configure the NearPoint Server to extract attachments from Exchange and deliver them from the NearPoint Server. That way, I don't have to have everyone's kids' pictures and other attachments clogging up the Exchange server. When a user sends an attachment to everyone in the company, it simply inserts a pointer to a file on the NearPoint Server. This makes Exchange more efficient and boosts performance, because the database shrinks considerably in size - in fact, ours has been reduced by two-thirds.

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