Mimosa Announces File System Archiving
It’s always exciting to be part of bringing something new and valuable to market. When I tell my friends about Mimosa’s new File System Archiving (FSA) offering, they tend to roll their eyes and yawn. But, none of my friends are IT Operations folks dealing with soaring storage costs and overflowing file systems; and, none of them are legal or compliance officers worried about finding and reviewing the terabytes of data that sit out on file shares.
Now, when I talk to potential customers about the FSA offering, I get their interest immediately. Perhaps that makes us all official geeks, but having dealt with these folks for a long time as an analyst at Forrester, I know their pain. First, they wanted to get email under control – and many did via email archiving. The next logical step was to corral free-range files, but the first-generation file archiving products presented some challenges. First, these products had trouble managing the movement of stub files (the stubs being the smaller objects that replace the full versions on primary storage with a pointer to the full version). Second, these products restored files back to the file system when users accessed the file (many call this the “ping-pong” effect). Both of these problems kept the adoption of file system archiving low, even though there was great customer interest in a consolidated archive of messages and file system content.
Mimosa’s NearPoint FSA offers a solution that gets past these traditional problems – no more “follow the stub” nightmares during backup routines and no restoring files to the server when users access them (because then those files have to be archived again). IT Ops can love the solution because it saves storage costs with global deduplication across messages and file system content, plus any backup tape content that may have been imported to the archive. Legal, compliance, and records management can love the solution because it offers a single, unified archive in which to apply consistent retention policies, execute universal legal holds, and conduct eDiscovery searches in a single user interface. Mimosa’s NearPoint FSA is truly the next-generation solution that solves real business problems. To me, it’s got that rare combination of being both innovative and pragmatic.
As a former analyst, I’m a believer in 3rd party validation. See what some of the analysts had to say about Mimosa’s FSA – both ESG and Taneja weigh in with their thoughts that you can find here.
It’s great to be part of this new product launch and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it – feel free to post comments here or email me at bmurphy@mimosasystems.com.
