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Peachtree Special Risk Brokers Rely on Mimosa NearPoint for High Risk Management for Microsoft Exchange Server |
“The major benefits of NearPoint are being assured that our archives are intact, no exchange journaling and a very simple user friendly interface. NearPoint as a whole is well structured and the entire architecture is well laid out.” |
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Peachtree is a specialty insurance company that markets insurance for high risk commercial properties. Part of a public company, it is required to meet Sarbanes-Oxley compliance regulations. Native Exchange tools were not able to handle archival needs, and they faced challenges with journaling. Peachtree looked for a solution to help with compliance, legal discovery and storage management.
Email is the backbone of the Peachtree business, used by staff as the primary communication vehicle with clients. The nature of the business calls for frequent delivery of very large attachment files — insurance policy, binders and pictures of commercial property — often reaching 50 MB. As email and attachments are considered part of a client’s business record, email data must remain accessible for active clients, and accessible for 300 days for clients who do not renew their insurance policy. After this time period, the email and attachments are moved to secondary storage.
Managing this large amount of message information on the Exchange Server was a challenge. The high volume of email and size of attachments inflated user mailboxes to an average of 1GB with the total Exchange storage for 200 staff members exceeding 300 GB. “I was not successful using Exchange journaling to manage my Mailbox Stores for compliance due to the massive amount of data,” said Ultan Kinahan, IT Manager, Peachtree. “In addition, I wanted a solution that could help me perform faster Exchange recovery and reduce my total Exchange storage.”
The Exchange issues Peachtree faced include:
Peachtree completed its installation of Mimosa NearPoint in August 2006 smoothly and quickly with the assistance of Mimosa Professional Services. To support its two Exchange 2003 servers and 300 GB of total storage, Peachtree installed two new Dell servers. The first is a dual core Xeon machine with 4 GB of memory. This server was used to host the Microsoft SQL Server application. NearPoint uses Microsoft SQL database to manage the archive meta information. The second server is a dual processor Xeon with 4 GB of memory. This server hosts the NearPoint application. A 1.5 TB array of storage is attached to store the Exchange database files and the archive message (including attachments) data.
Compliance Benefits of using NearPoint:
Immediately following the NearPoint installation, new policies for seven year retention and disposition were implemented. “Following guidance provided by our public accounts, I implemented a seven year archive retention policy for my entire staff,” said Kinahan. “During our internal audit we uncovered some severe gaps in the way email was being managed. For example, we had no policy to protect user’s email after they leave the company.” Using NearPoint, Kinahan was able to implement a group policy that manages all email in the archive for seven years. After seven years, email is automatically deleted from the archive. The seven year time period was chosen to meet the SOX requirements for email archiving.
Legal Discovery Benefits of using NearPoint:
Peachtree protects properties located in New York City. In a recent request from the NYC Office of the Attorney General, Kinahan had to devote one full time IT staff member for two weeks to search the mailbox records for certain Peachtree staff members. “I cannot begin to describe the pain (and cost) we endured to comply with this request for two years of email records from mailboxes,” said Kinahan. “I wish this request would have come after I had NearPoint installed. The next time this type of request occurs, I will use NearPoint and reduce the total search time to just a few minutes.”
Peachtree’s experience in NYC is just an example of the type of requests that can come from local, state and federal government agencies to wish to view historical email records for audit purposes. Using NearPoint, Kinahan can quickly search any mailbox, gather results and export results in a .PST file. Searches that took days and weeks of searching backup tapes can not be formed in just minutes using NearPoint.
Storage Benefits of using NearPoint:
Storage growth on the Exchange Servers was a very difficult challenge for Kinahan. At the time NearPoint was installed, the total storage size was 300 GB and growing. “I have not implemented mailbox quotas for my users to avoid having many .PST files to trouble shoot,” said Kinahan. “But this policy has caused a very challenging storage problem on my Exchange Servers.”
To provide immediate storage relief, Kinahan implemented a NearPoint Mailbox Extension policy affecting attachments older than 365 days or larger than 20 KB . This storage policy reduced the Exchange storage by removing all attachments files that meet these two parameters. The impact was to immediately reduce Exchange storage and put a cap on new growth. “I wanted to stop storage growth quickly and the 1 year policy I configured using NearPoint provided me with immediate relief,” said Kinahan. “My next step is to implement a more aggressive 90-day/20 KB size policy and I expect this to reduce my total storage by over 50%.”
Disaster Recovery Benefits of using NearPoint:
Peachtree has a very sophisticated disaster recovery plan in place that was driven by the nature of its business and the risks imposed by the geographical location of its offices. NearPoint fits perfectly into Kinahan’s disaster recover plans for Exchange. “My service levels require a four hour recovery time for the Exchange databases,” said Kinahan. “Using NearPoint I can restore any Exchange database file quickly from disk in just 1-2 hours, easily meeting my service level requirements.” In addition to fitting into the existing disaster recovery plan, NearPoint enables easy mailbox restore and self-service restore of individual messages. “In matters of staff turn over, it is nice to know each mailbox is always protected and can be restored quickly,” said Kinahan. “My users also enjoy the Self-Service Access™ that NearPoint provides via Outlook (and OWA) allowing quick search and restore of lost message and attachments.”
NearPoint is allowing Peachtree to effectively manage its critical email information, while reducing Exchange storage and providing the tools to easily meet email discovery and compliance requirements.
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