Lagan Selects Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that Lagan Group, the international construction and construction materials group with headquarters in Northern Ireland, has selected Mimosa NearPoint for the rapid backup, archiving and recovery of thousands of business-critical documents held on five Microsoft Office SharePoint Servers used by its employees in 50 locations around the world.

Microsoft SharePoint, the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s history, is a collection of server-side tools and applications that allows businesses to make documents and other data available through a single online portal.
 
Lagan chose Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint because it offers the fastest backup, archiving and recovery capabilities on the market. In addition, because Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint also works seamlessly with Mimosa NearPoint for Exchange, which Lagan had already deployed, the company can use a single, unified platform for the archiving and recovery of any document held anywhere within the organisation.
 
Jim Fennell, Information System Manager at Lagan, explains the problem his organisation was facing: "Most of Lagan’s business is project-driven and the company had standardised on SharePoint. At any point we might have 60 SharePoint sites in operation holding thousands of documents, from project contracts and drawings to new business tenders and proposals. The consequences of losing even one document, let alone an entire SharePoint site, could be catastrophic to a project. A fast and efficient backup, archiving and recovery strategy was essential."
 
However, Lagan’s SharePoint backups had become incredibly inefficient and slow. Weekly backups were taking over 24 hours while recovering a single lost or deleted document, because it required the entire SharePoint server to be recovered, could take a full working day.
 
Mimosa NearPoint’s features, including single-instancing and stubbing of files, will help Lagan eliminate the unnecessary backup of duplicate files across an organsation. It also offers users a fine-grain recovery feature to quickly recover individual files without requiring a full server restore. He concludes: "With NearPoint we’re expecting our backup windows to shrink while recovering a single lost or deleted file will take a couple of clicks and a matter of seconds."
 
Lagan will also be able to set policies that automatically take documents that have not been touched for 30 days out of SharePoint and moved into NearPoint. This document is then stubbed in SharePoint, but held in NearPoint, in a way that is seamlessly accessible to the user. Because NearPoint can apply this feature to both Exchange and SharePoint across both platforms, it drives further storage efficiencies and also helps minimise backup and recovery times, even though data is actually growing.