Article Avenue - free articles and downloads - The Power of Next-Generation Archiving Continues To Amaze

Even before I began working for an integrated content archiving software provider, I was well aware of the fact that archiving software provides benefits across several spectrums.

There's saving storage costs by moving information off expensive production storage; there's eDiscovery savings and risk mitigation by proactively retaining and disposing of information according to policy; and there's the end-user productivity benefit of allowing workers to save as much information as they need without having to create PSTs or figure other work-arounds to get past quotas. All of these benefits are huge, but there is so much more to the story.

Quick background to set some context here - I come from the world of ECM and records management. I began to study eDiscovery from that perspective, thus I thought of the benefits of proactively managing information from the point of view of a records manager or a General Counsel. And, yes, these folks really care about archiving and the benefits is can provide.

However, these folks are less likely to want to dig under the hood of the archive software and see what truly differentiates one from another. And, I was no different…I was so impressed with all the benefits that archiving could provide, it almost didn't matter to me that all the differentiation is under the hood.

What's changed for me since coming to work at Mimosa is that I know talk to way more IT operations and infrastructures pros than I ever did before.

These folks want their records managers and General Counsels to get the legal and risk mitigation of the archive solutions. But, these folks also have to deal with many things that records managers and General Counsels never have to think about.

Ask a GC what IOPS is I guarantee you won't get the right answer. But, input-output per second (IOPS) on an Exchange server is an extremely important metric.

The more IOPS on your server, the harder it is to manage and scale. And, first-gen archiving solutions rely on capture mechanisms like MAPI and Journaling, both of which can increase IOPS up to 50%. Once you take that increase into account, the benefits of archiving start to look less glamorous.

And so, I'm back to the title of this post. Mimosa is the only next-generation archiving solution that capture content with zero production system footprint. No increase to IOPS, no agents on Exchange servers. Mimosa captures a full compliance copy of all Exchange data (including those things journaling can't get like calendar items, task, item histories, etc.) and then uses "Smart Extract" technology to archive any information that meets an organization's archiving policy.

Oh, and by the way, because Mimosa uses "continuous application shadowing" (using transaction logs from Exchange to be replayed into a shadow database, from which information is archived), the system also offers completely integrated recover and optional DR. Important?

Go ask any message administrator that has had to remount the last full tape backup, plus any incrementals, in order to recover a mailbox. My money says they will take Mimosa's point-in-time recovery capabilities that have the mailbox back in a matter of minutes instead of spending a full day trying to restore a mailbox.

It's part of what I love about the job - getting a new perspective on the benefits of archiving. And, learning the importance of next-generation archiving because of things like integrated recovery. Archiving has always killed multiple birds with one stone…Mimosa just keeps adding more and more birds to the repertoire…and it's fun to watch.

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Sarah Howard writes for Mimosa Systems about information management solutions that unify email archiving, data protection and disaster recovery in one solution. Mimosa Systems provides email archiving, ediscovery, data recovery, data storage, and document management for the new generation of critical enterprise information.