Idex Group Selects Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that Idex Group, the first independent group of French energy and environmental services, has selected Mimosa NearPoint to archive its Exchange messaging platform on NetApp storage.

With 3,500 employees, Idex Group designs and implements solutions for the production and distribution of useful energy and integration services. As part of a larger digitization and archiving project, Idex has implemented the Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange solution to archive their Exchange email data. Facing dramatic data growth, the Idex Group was struggling with the management of disparate corporate information. Whether in print, on the server, in employee PCs or email folders, information had become decentralized and unstructured. To meet this challenge, the group decided in early 2009 to launch a global project to scan and archive all of its critical business documents.

Idex selected the Mimosa NearPoint solution for Exchange archiving and PST file management. The solution will be deployed on 1,200 mailboxes with support services delivered by integrator Optrium for completion before the end of the year.

"Our goal is to implement a comprehensive project to provide a solution for managing information across the enterprise," said Somchay Norindr, IT director, Idex. "This project has a particularly important component: the management and archiving of messaging to optimize the size and performance of our Exchange environment and control information over the long term. We were looking for a solution capable of integrating with the existing as well as collaborative tools that we plan to deploy in the future. We were also impressed by its ease of implementation, its low impact on users and the scalability it offers for eDiscovery readiness and response to legal information requests."

"We have chosen the Mimosa solution primarily for its simplicity of implementation and integration with existing systems, particularly our NetApp storage systems," said Norindr. "Mimosa NearPoint has an exclusive integration with NetApp’s Snap Manager for Exchange, which enables us to use the NetApp storage management tool as a source to conduct data archiving. This ensures the sustainability of our existing architecture. We were also impressed that NearPoint can be deployed without adding any agents on our employee workstations, thus significantly improving the productivity of our teams. Finally, all of our email profiles will have access to archives through Outlook, a PDA or a BlackBerry, so they can access data whether they are connected or not."

Norindr also identified the value of NearPoint’s rapid implementation of archiving policies which is simplified through a configuration wizard which helps administrators to easily set their rules for archiving. Norindr additionally named the scalability of the NearPoint solution as key to its selection. NearPoint scales to new sources and content archives and can support a significant increase in the number of user files without modifying the existing one. Another point which attracted teams from Idex Group was NearPoint’s integrated continuous data protection.

"By choosing Mimosa NearPoint, we have Continuous Application Shadowing which captures and saves disk streaming of all data before it is archived," said Norindr. "This feature allows the recovery of data by the user directly through the NearPoint interface without assistance from our IT department. It also allows the reconstruction of an Exchange server with ease. For all these reasons, I am certain NearPoint is the solution we needed to optimally meet our needs."

"International organizations such as Idex Group continue to benefit from the comprehensive archiving features of NearPoint, including recovery, eDiscovery and storage management optimization," said T.M. Ravi, CEO, Mimosa Systems. "With seamless NetApp-NearPoint integration, Idex can be assured that its messaging environment is protected and secure while lowering storage costs and delivering the scalability they need as their environment grows."