World’s Largest Automated Greenhouse Leader Turns to Mimosa NearPoint to Help Manage Rapid Growth and Ensure Business Continuity
Santa Clara, Calif .– July 8, 2008 – Mimosa Systems, a leader in Live Content Archiving solutions, today announced that Metrolina Greenhouses has deployed the next-generation Mimosa NearPoint™ content archiving solution for rapid information discovery, retention, protection, and recovery of its vital email data.
With 160 acres of heated greenhouses, the Huntersville, NC–based wholesale plant company maintains the largest automated single-site heated greenhouse facility in the world. The firm's total site capacity—including planted annuals and hanging plants—is 325 acres. Now 35 years old, Metrolina distributes all along the East Coast, from New York to Florida, supplying a broad range of flowering plants to such retail giants as Loew's and Wal-Mart, and employs 800 people, a 100 percent increase in employment since 2000.
The company's rapid expansion has spurred growth in its email volume to a hefty 30 percent per year, with email boxes averaging six gigabytes. Metrolina is hardly alone in dealing with this kind of exponential growth of data. According to IDC's Digital Universe study, the amount of data stored has grown fifty-fold in the past three years. Businesses are turning more and more data into useful information, and that trend, combined with increased regulatory and legal accountability, has compounded the problem of how to store, manage, archive, and ensure the safety and security of all this data.
“The size of our users' email boxes had gotten out of control. We had no intelligent way for end users to search and recover email. So user requests got filtered to IT, diverting IT from critical-path activities,” said, AJ Klum, network operations manager, Metrolina Greenhouses. “This was seriously threatening our ability to do business; email is a critical application for a number of transactions, including contracts and customer orders. Many days we close $2 million in business and we absolutely can't go down. We needed to create a robust, redundant environment to archive emails and provide one-click disaster recovery, so our 24x7 operations are not jeopardized.”
Mimosa Nearpoint Creates Bulletproof Email Environment
Metrolina Greenhouses chose Mimosa NearPoint because of its next-generation approach to archiving Microsoft® Exchange 2007 email information, along with its ease of installation and one-click recovery. “We didn't have to bring the system down for one minute. From taking the servers out of the box to installing the software, we were in business in less than four hours; it was the easiest installation I can remember,” said Klum. “We now have a bulletproof email exchange and archive messaging environment because of Mimosa. The NearPoint modular platform allows turnkey operations for integrated content archiving, in-place retention management, end-user search, and protection of one of our most valuable resources—our email. With seamless backup and disaster recovery, we know we can keep operations running smoothly. I finally feel secure that we won't go down, so I sleep better at night.”
Key Mimosa NearPoint features that were particularly important to Metrolina Greenhouses include:
“NearPoint is the only real choice on the market today for a company, like Metrolina, that needs to be absolutely, positively sure its Exchange environment won't go down,” said Scott Whitney, vice president of product management, Mimosa Systems. “Companies that depend so heavily on email data need a fail-safe system that won't let them down. That's what our one-click recovery functionality is all about.”
About Metrolina Greenhouses
Metrolina Greenhouses is a family-owned wholesale plant company started in 1972 by Tom VanWingerden shortly after he moved to North Carolina from Holland. Within a year of its inception, the business outgrew a 200,000-square-foot greenhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, and moved to a site in Huntersville, where it stands today on 325 acres. With more than 160 acres under glass, Metrolina runs the largest single-site heated greenhouse in the United States. It is also one of the most automated operations, with automatic transplanters and watering and fertilizing systems. Each year the greenhouse ships millions of plants—including spring bedding plants, summer annuals, fall mums and pansies, and winter poinsettias—to mass merchandisers, home improvement chains, food chains, and independent retailers and florists.
About Mimosa NearPoint
Mimosa NearPoint addresses critical customer requirements around content archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and storage optimization in a unified solution. Mimosa NearPoint provides legal search workflow, immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, email, instant message and file archiving, and self-service search and access in one solution. By leveraging cost-effective storage and advanced classification rules, NearPoint also optimizes content storage and reduces overall infrastructure costs.
About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation content archiving solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry's most comprehensive unstructured information management software solution for email, files, backup tapes, and instant messages, enabling archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and recovery in a unified solution. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in networking infrastructure solutions, ISV/software solutions, and advanced infrastructure solutions. Mimosa is a privately held company whose investors include Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Focus Ventures. Mimosa was founded in 2003 and is based in Santa Clara, California, with offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Australia, and India. For more information, see www.mimosasystems.com.
Mimosa, Mimosa Systems, and Mimosa NearPoint are trademarks of Mimosa Systems. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
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