Washington State University: Empowering Email Self Service, Customized Archiving with Mimosa NearPoint
"Mimosa NearPoint™ gives me the ability to give everyone email the way they want it. With NearPoint's flexible settings options and seamless self-service access to archived data, I can empower my users to manage email according to the way they work most productively." — Vernene Scheurer, Computer System Administrator, WSU Puyallup

Background

Washington State University (WSU) provides world-class education to a diverse student population of 23,000 statewide. WSU Puyallup is a research and extension center of Washington State University dedicated to bringing the benefits of quality research and education to youth, families, communities and the environment.

During Vernene Scheurer's 25 years managing the IT environment at WSU Puyallup, she has faced numerous challenges in managing the Exchange environment for her diverse group of users. As she explains her primary goal as "making the jobs of the staff easier," she is well aware that effective management of email data and Exchange is critical in accomplishing this goal.

Business Situation

Scheurer had experienced an increasingly critical series of Exchange and email issues. "Exchange service disruptions can be caused by any number of problems - hardware failures and log files filling up disk space are two examples," explains Scheurer. "In one situation, over three months of email data was lost when several backup sets proved to be incomplete. The total recovery time was several days." This loss of email service was unacceptable, given the time-sensitive nature of her users who used email to meet deadlines adding up to millions of dollars in grant applications. "Much of what our staff does, they do over email," explains Ms. Scheurer of WSU Puyallup. "When email is down I hear about it immediately."

Another issue encountered related to space problems due to the 16 GB limitation of the Exchange 2003 Standard Edition. "One user started sending email with large attachments which immediately brought Exchange services to a halt. It took several days to recover the database without the large attachments. Another time, a user's mailbox disappeared for an unknown reason, which took one full day to complete the mailbox restore from backup tape." For individual message recovery, Scheurer was forced to deny user requests for help because it was too time consuming and too disruptive to the other users.

In addition to service and recovery related problems, Scheurer was constantly challenged by storage problems on Exchange Server. Some users require that they have access to all email from years back, while others require limited access to email that is just 30 days old. It is difficult, however, to predict individual mailbox capacity needs, and to have the tools to meet these needs. By setting individual mailbox quota limits, users run up against limits at unforeseen times, increasing their frustration levels. "Disruptions caused by mailbox quota limits and not being able to restore individual email are both examples of real-life problems that my IT staff and business users face every day."

Solution

WSU Puyallup chose Mimosa NearPoint to customize individual email archive policies to meet individual user needs while reducing storage and assuring fast, easy recovery of all data.

"This looked too good to be true. It will solve all of my Exchange problems - fast recovery, mailbox size/storage limitations and self-service archive access-- in one solution."

NearPoint for Recovery:
Mimosa NearPoint was installed on a Windows 2003 server with SATA RAID storage. Deployment went smoothly due to no agents or drivers to install on Exchange and no desktop clients to deploy. NearPoint's One Pass Protection™ clearly differentiates NearPoint from traditional email archive products. One Pass Protection maintains a full Exchange database replica on the NearPoint server for recovery and archival. One Pass Protection keeps the Exchange replica up-to-date by continuously shipping Exchange Log Files to the NearPoint server where they are applied to the full database replica and avoids the performance penalty of Microsoft Exchange Journaling. "When I considered the difficulty I had in the past recovering Exchange, I was amazed to see how quickly I can recover Exchange using NearPoint," says Scheurer.

"Using NearPoint I can recovery a full Exchange database or an individual mailbox with just a simple point and click. As an example recently I had to restore a mailbox for a staff member who had left the organization and later I found out that the corresponding manager needed the contact lists this person had created. Using NearPoint I was able to retrieve this information quickly. It saved so much time and headaches. I cannot even imagine the pain it would have caused to restore this same mailbox information from backup tapes," said Scheurer.

NearPoint for Storage Management
For managing mailbox size, Scheurer used NearPoint's Mailbox Extension, an automated, policy driven process that removes weighty attachment files from Exchange and replaces them with small 'stub-files'. "NearPoint lets me keep mailbox quotas while significantly reducing the amount of storage for each mailbox. By configuring NearPoint to automatically maintain mailbox storage below these quota limits, my users never see a quota limit warning," said Scheurer. For the majority of users, a NearPoint Mailbox Extension policy of 14 days and 100 KB size is used. This keeps all these users comfortably below the 100 MB mailbox quota. For a handful of users who have 200 MB size mailboxes, the NearPoint Mailbox Extension watermark feature keeps users at or below the 85% mailbox capacity automatically.

PST file problems have also been eliminated. Before NearPoint, users relied on PST files to keep access to old emails, with one user keeping all email data in PST files. Because users are now well below their mailbox quota limits, they no longer require local storage in PST files. User's simply re-loaded email from existing PST files so that it was archived by NearPoint. "Now, we don't have to worry about PSTs. Everything is kept in the mailbox, and is easily accessible," continues Scheurer.

NearPoint for Email Retention
To address WSU's email compliance requirements, NearPoint provides a real-time archive capability that stores a single copy of all Exchange messages and attachments in a central repository. This central repository, called the NearPoint Indexed Object Repository, is the means by which Scheurer can set retention policies to keep all email for a period of time (years) until it is disposed. In the event of an investigation, NearPoint has a 'retention freeze' feature that avoids any undesirable removal of data until the investigation completes. "I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that not only does NearPoint manage Exchange mailbox size problem; it also provides a full email archive of my Exchange data," describes Scheurer. "As a public institution we are responsible for keeping our records safe and making them accessible. NearPoint is helping my department meet its record keeping duty."

Benefits

Mimosa NearPoint has solved WSU's recovery issues so that no user is impacted by downtime for recovery across all levels. "It's an amazing relief to know NearPoint is in place, knowing I'm never again looking at days of downtime due to recovery issues. It won't take any time now to recover a mailbox, a message, or a database," says Scheurer. "A loss of email services is not only a nuisance to users; it can be a major risk to research grants and potentially millions of dollars. If the email system is down, it can cause financial losses for those working on grants, which are time critical, and managed via email. If deadlines are missed due to the system being down for recovery, etc. millions of dollars can be put at risk."

Using NearPoint, Vernene has been able to improve overall email services in terms of service availability and storage capacity. With NearPoint, she can customize the email rules for each user. Each user's settings are customized to accommodate the way they work with email - individual message recovery, email retention policies and mailbox capacity are three such examples.

Finally, Scheurer feels the customer service has been a great part of her positive experience. "Mimosa has been with me every step of the way with constant encouragement and support. The customer service has been fabulous. Mimosa is at the top of my list!"

"I think NearPoint is just a fabulous product. Considering all of the issues I've had in the past with Exchange, NearPoint is like a bright light, there to help me make email available to my users all of the time."

 

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