Mimosa Steers Microsoft Exchange E-mail Backup

Today, e-mail is considered a mission-critical application. However, it is a fragile transaction system in which administrators have to pour countless man-hours to keep it stable and secure. And, as government tightens regulations on how to store, retrieve and archive e-mails, it is forcing administrators to preserve and monitor e-mail archives and activities for several years. This creates the No. 1 problem for administrators: server size. On many Microsoft Exchange deployments, server size comes down to backup capability. With this restriction, administrators often place mailbox quotas of 150 Mbytes, which forces users to create their own local archives, or eventually a company just ends up buying another server.

Microsoft Exchange has never successfully combined disaster recovery, dynamic storage management and plain old backup into a single solution until now.

Microsoft now works with a new technology partner, Mimosa Systems, to provide key archiving technologies on some of its large Exchange deployments.

Mimosa’s Nearpoint for Microsoft Exchange Server 1.2 uses a unique architecture that maintains a single copy of a message or attachment and manages it all through one console. Nearpoint’s process minimizes the performance impact on Exchange by doing all processing on its own server and without having to run server agents on Exchange servers.

However, because Exchange Server 2003 uses the concept of multiple databases on one server, companies that use this Exchange version often end up consolidating e-mail servers onto a single server, thus creating smaller database backups but ultimately transferring bigger amounts and often bogging down server activity.

For years, competing e-mail backup vendors have been using agents running locally on Exchange servers. Agent-based technology preprocesses and compresses data before transmitting over a network to a backup server. Because Mimosa’s architecture drastically minimizes the hit on Exchange and provides an efficient storage mechanism, customers can save right away by not having to purchase large drive arrays or high-performance SCSI drives to run a Nearpoint server.

At its core, Nearpoint uses a technology called Continuous Application Channeling that uses Exchange’s old extensible backup API to tap into all production databases and bring them into a Nearpoint server. Nearpoint monitors Exchange transaction logs, which contain all the data of every message, and on a periodic basis, it copies these logs over to its server. Administrators also can turn on realtime monitoring, which immediately copies a change made by Exchange to a log file.

Once those transactions are copied over, Nearpoint uses an extraction algorithm to separate mailboxes, messages, attachments, notes, calendars and tasks. When the information is extracted, Nearpoint indexes the attachments, message bodies and subject lines. Nearpoint uses a file-indexing system that stores these files right on a Windows file system and maintains only metadata on its Index Object Repository. To further optimize all its data, Nearpoint performs a single global instancing in which all duplicates of every message are removed.

The server’s One Pass Protection feature provides granular recovery of every separate instance it stores. Therefore, with one scan of its database, Nearpoint can provide database, mailbox and even message-level recovery. The power behind this architecture is that it gives users the power to recover their own messages without depending on administrators.

Mimosa is actively engaging partners with a two-tier channel program. Partners will be classified as either an executive partner or a business partner. Executive partners are offered a margin of 15 percent, with a 20 percent rebate added after deal registration. They must have at least two Mimosa Trained Consultants (MTC) on staff and close at least three deals per quarter. Executive partners are offered a robust partner program, which includes training support, lead referrals, dedicated Web portal, additional support options and so on, making the partner program quite comprehensive.

Business partners do not need to meet the strict requirements of Executive partners and must only have one MTC on staff. Business partners receive a margin of 15 percent, and a 10 percent rebate upon deal registration. Most of the specialized channel program offers available to Executive partners are restricted for Business partners.

Solution providers that are genuinely serious about selling Mimosa’s products will want to pursue the Executive partner level.