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By Ann Silverthorn
December 10, 2007—Mimosa Systems, which provides e-mail archiving solutions, will announce tomorrow a disaster-recovery option for its flagship NearPoint archiving software. Designed for Microsoft Exchange environments, the disaster-recovery option is automatic, allowing organizations to maintain uptime and application consistency.
"The e-discovery pain that organizations are feeling is fueling the disaster-recovery market, along with the ever-present storage pains," says Bob Spurzem, senior product marketing manager at Mimosa. "Customers are struggling with the data they must search, and now almost every court case subpoenas e-mail."
Mimosa officials claim Exchange recovery in minutes, but that generally means within an hour. The option is not designed to be an instant fail-over product for mission-critical applications. Spurzem says the disaster-recovery feature is for situations where businesses can tolerate an hour of e-mail downtime.
The NearPoint Disaster Recovery option does not require kernel drivers or agents on the Exchange server. Mimosa claims continuous data protection (CDP) at the transaction-log level, along with recovery at the database, mailbox, and message levels.
The application-intelligent recovery that NearPoint Disaster Recovery offers is designed to preserve the consistency and integrity of Exchange data by preventing replication of corrupted Exchange databases.
With the disaster-recovery module, users can recover Exchange services to a local, remote, or standby Exchange server. The software supports local/remote and warm/cold configuration.
With the new release, Mimosa provided a cost reduction in provisioning by eliminating one of the usual two target servers. Prior to this version of the product, the primary NearPoint was replicated to a target NearPoint, which then was attached to a standby Exchange server. Now, NearPoint replicates directly to an Exchange standby server and places the files in a directory that Exchange can't see—yet.
When needed, the administrator moves the directory to the Exchange server at the target disaster-recovery site, which is on standby. Exchange doesn't run until the fail-over is initiated, which Spurzem says takes just a couple of clicks. The bulk files are then moved to the standby Exchange server. Outlook profiles are also placed on it, which points all employees' profiles to the new Exchange box. The NearPoint Disaster Recovery option offers automated e-mail service restoration, including e-mail access to end users.
The NearPoint base product for 2,000 mailboxes is priced at $40 per mailbox. The disaster-recovery function costs $5 extra per mailbox and requires no extra provisioning. Mimosa also offers an enterprise edition, which includes a discovery key for use by attorneys.
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