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Siegfried Group Dramaticaly Improves Exchange Performance with Mimosa NearPoint |
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The Siegfried Group is a CPA firm established in 1988 that delivers a full range of accounting and financial resource services to major public companies and other large organizations throughout the United States. The Siegfried Group provides high-caliber, experienced accounting and financial professionals to assist with the implementation of high-priority, critical financial work.
Microsoft Exchange Server is an important communication tool for The Siegfried Group. The Siegfried group operates in 27 cities spread across the US and the majority of the company’s employees are either remote or mobile. After three years of rapid growth, The Siegfried Group’s total email data for 600 users had quickly grown to over 250GB. Frank McGurk, who manages the Exchange Servers for Siegfried Group, sought to reduce and enhance management of its total Exchange storage. “The primary reason I contacted Mimosa was performance,” said Frank. “We had huge Exchange Stores. We could throw more servers and storage at Exchange, but did we really want to maintain 7 GB mailboxes? We went over all the variables and we decided our best solution was to reduce mailbox size.”
Large Exchange mail Stores create many problems for Exchange recovery and overall performance. Microsoft Exchange supports recovery of full database files and mailbox restores using third-party backup applications. Recovery of full database files is difficult when the size of the individual database files exceeds 40GB in size and total recovery time is 6-12 hours. Large database files also lengthen the time to perform a “brick-level” backup, necessary for mailbox recovery, and this impacts user performance. “We needed a better recovery system for Exchange,” said Frank. “Our goal was to reduce Exchange Store size, allowing faster recovery and we needed a recovery solution that could perform a full Exchange database restore quickly and an Exchange mailbox restore with using “brick-level” backups.”
Mimosa NearPoint is an application-aware solution that runs on standard Intel hardware and provides deep integration with Exchange and Outlook. It is disk-based and leverages commodity storage, such as SATA RAID, to provide continuous data protection and access to archived data from multiple Exchange Servers. There are no agents or drivers to install on the mission-critical Exchange Server and there is no need to deploy clients to each desktop/laptop within the organization. Administrators perform immediate restores and configure policies using the standard Microsoft Management Console. Mimosa NearPoint provides users and auditors with instant search-and-access to e-mail that has been protected, archived, and extended via a standard Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access user interface.
Mimosa NearPoint Mailbox Extension is a standard feature of NearPoint that removes attachment files from Exchange Server and replaces them with small ‘stub-files’. The benefit of Mailbox Extension is an immediate reduction in total Exchange Storage by removing capacity hungry attachments from every mailbox. Mailboxes that were pushing their mailbox limit can be reduced by over 80% using NearPoint. Mailbox Extension benefits Exchange recovery time by reducing Stores size. Mailbox Extension also benefits individual users who otherwise have to spend valuable time grooming their mailboxes. For improving both Exchange recovery and overall performance, reducing Exchange Store size is the key feature that NearPoint Mailbox Extension performs.
NearPoint provides full Exchange recovery at the database and mailbox level as a standard feature. Using simple GUI’s and “one-click” operations, administrators can restore a full Exchange database in a matter of minutes. NearPoint manages and protects a current copy of the Exchange database files on its disk storage, ready at anytime for recovery to Exchange. Recovery of a full Exchange database from disk over a LAN enables much greater performance as compared to traditional tape recovery. NearPoint also enables restoration of Exchange mailboxes with the same “one-click” operation. Mailboxes can are restored with complete current contents, in just minutes. This is a vast improvement over third-party “brick-level” backup applications that greatly impact Exchange performance.
Before NearPoint Mailbox Extension was deployed, NearPoint was installed and a complete archive of the Exchange Servers was performed. NearPoint deploys a unique process called Application Shadowing to capture and archive all Exchange information. Application Shadowing performs with no Agent software installed on Exchange and has no impact on Exchange performance. Once the entire contents of Exchange are archived on the NearPoint server, the Mailbox Extension policy is deployed. Mailbox Extension is a policy based tool that uses age and size to determine which attachments to remove from Exchange Server. Because it performs off-host, it can be run during the daytime without impacting Exchange Performance.
Before running Mailbox Extension, the Siegfried Exchange Servers held four Stores with 80 GB of email each. The Mailbox Extension policy was configured for 60 days and 30 KB size and was applied to all mailboxes. Because Mailbox Extension runs “off-host”, it was scheduled during the daytime with no impact on Exchange. The result of running the Mailbox Extension job was an immediate reduction in the size of each Store to between 10 and 15 GB of email each – an 80% reduction. “We used NearPoint to pull out attachments. This feature alone was responsible for reducing total capacity as well as individual mailbox size.”
Smaller Exchange mail Stores, directly benefit Exchange backup and recovery. “We can now perform a daily full backup of Exchange in only two hours,” said Frank. “And should we ever need to restore an Exchange database, I am more comfortable knowing the recovery will complete in less time.” NearPoint also provides mailbox level recovery, using the same easy to use GUI that performs full database recovery. “Now that NearPoint is deployed, I can perform full database and mailbox level recovery. I no longer need to run brick-level backups. This eliminates the cost of backup media and eliminates the impact that brick-level backups were having on my Exchange Server,” said Frank.
Siegfried users have noticed an improvement in Outlook performance since NearPoint was deployed. Without the burden of attachment files, Exchange and Outlook both perform noticeably faster. Users enjoy access to all archive email with NearPoint Self-Service Access™ via Outlook. Using Self-Service Access, users can quickly search and browse their archive mailbox for any content including email, calendars and contacts. The legal staff at Siegfried also has enjoyed NearPoint Self-Service Access. Using the NearPoint audit roles, Frank can enable auditors to view other mailboxes and search their contents from Outlook. “NearPoint makes it easy to find archival material for legal and HR, in as little as five minutes,” said Frank.
For the installation of NearPoint, Frank McGurk provisioned a Windows 2003 Server using guidelines provided by Mimosa support and service. “Mimosa’s technical support was exceptional. Overall the installation went very smoothly and took less time than I expected,” Frank said.
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