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Madera County Gets More Space with |
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Located in California’s Central Valley, Madera County boasts not only the magnificent Yosemite National Park as one of its assets, but is also the home of one of the largest children’s hospitals in the USA, Valley Children’s Hospital. It’s a place where families can afford spacious houses and their kids can join 4-H or play sports a few blocks from home. With exceptional school choices, a plethora of local and state parks in addition to Yosemite, lush agriculture, and a strong economy, Madera County has a lot to offer.
“Space, space and space,” said Bruce Lorimer, Information System Supervisor for Madera County. “We were completely out of storage space on our Microsoft Exchange Server and with no user policies and no mailbox quotas in place, we had no way to get storage growth under control. My users were using Exchange as a file system to store all their email and attachments, which was helping them work more efficiently, but it was causing a major storage problem on Exchange.”
Because Exchange is not designed to store loads of email and attachments indefinitely, Bruce knew he had to find another solution. “Exchange was designed to send and receive email. I went shopping for an email archiving product that would allow my users to access all their archive email off-host and allow me to clean up their mailboxes. For the archive to meet my needs it must keep all email records (and attachments) in safe and secure storage and my users must be able to access their archive records easily.”
Bruce’s goal was to reduce Exchange storage to 90 days—he knew that would sharply reduce his Exchange storage issues and keep it at a sustainable level. But he could not simply remove email older than 90 days because this would drive email underground in PST files. “A PST problem was the last thing that I wanted,” explained Bruce.
He continued, “My Exchange cluster keeps email service up and running should anything fail on my Exchange server, and for disaster recovery I want to replicate my Exchange data to a remote Exchange Server to protect against a major disaster hitting my primary data center. My SLA for Exchange is four hours and this allows me time to failover and re-starts email services after a disaster.”
NearPoint has already been used on four occasions for eDiscovery. Given the custodian names, key words, and time period, NearPoint provided the results in less than 30 minutes.
Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server is the email archiving solutions that was chosen by the Madera County to solve its Exchange storage problems and for its disaster recovery project. NearPoint also was able to help the county with four critical internal investigations that involved searching email.
The installation of NearPoint took just a couple of days and, according to Bruce, the overall process went very smoothly. He liked the fact that NearPoint did not install any agent software on Exchange or the desktops, which enabled the installation to go more quickly. A Mimosa support engineer was onsite to assist with the install, which is not typical, but given the close proximity of the Mimosa offices and the Madera County offices, the Mimosa employee helped with the install in person.
“A big thanks to your support team,” said Bruce. “They did a terrific job installing NearPoint. The basic retention policies were simple to implement and the overall system was up and running quickly.”
“NearPoint enables Exchange to perform in the manner for which it is designed.”
“With NearPoint installed, the first task was to implement our Exchange mailbox cleanup,” said Bruce. “Using the Exchange cleanup tools, we reduced Exchange mailbox size to 90 days. The mailboxes to which we applied the cleanup were decided by our management. Some employees were deemed exempt from the 90-day policy, but the majority was not.”
Bruce continued, “The sole reason the 90-day cleanup policy was possible, was because NearPoint had all of the mailbox content in its archive and the email is accessible to end users via Outlook. My users are very impressed with NearPoint. They can quickly access all their email in the archive with a single-click on the ‘Mimosa Archive Folder’ in their Outlook. Once they became accustomed to looking into NearPoint for any email over 90 days old, my storage problems vanished. The archive retention policy is five years,” said Bruce. “We deemed that would suffice for long-term email storage and NearPoint manages this policy automatically.”
Mimosa NearPoint can perform recovery to Exchange of individual mailboxes, database files, and complete Storage Groups. Madera County has already had one situation where NearPoint helped restore a mailbox.
“During the cleanup process we had one employee who protested and was able to gain non-exempt status,” explained Bruce. “This required us to restore their complete mailbox from the NearPoint archive back to Exchange. Using NearPoint, this mailbox recovery took just minutes.”
While the county didn’t purchase NearPoint specifically for legal discovery, that has proved to be an enormous bonus. “I have already used NearPoint on four occasions for eDiscovery and it has been a huge time saver,” Bruce commented. “Each of the four discoveries I performed involved internal disputes that required a search of email records. Given the custodian names, key words, and time period, I was able to produce the results in less than 30 minutes. If I had to search old backup tapes, the same search would have taken days.”
“As a government organization we are required by law to respond to requests for public information,” said Bruce. “I am comforted knowing that I can respond quickly for any search that involves email using NearPoint.”
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