IT Trends

Bowdoin College Battles E Mail Explosion with Mimosa Systems App

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/11/10

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME has implemented Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange e-mail storage. The application handles unified e-mail retention, e-discovery operations, storage optimization, and end-user search.

The college said its Exchange storage requirements have dropped by half with the use of the application. The reduction is a result of migrating or extending attachments based on policies having to do with message age, document size, and mailbox size. NearPoint has also reduced support calls by providing an end-user self-service restoration service, according to the college.

The institution began its search for an e-mail management system three years after implementing Exchange 2003, when it faced exponential e-mail data growth. The college's Exchange server storage grew from 150 GB to 2 TB, and backup and recovery times were becoming unmanageable, according to Systems Engineer Mike Bowden. It could take up to two days to recover a database, and the performance impacts of a backup were unacceptable, he said.

Also, the college wanted a solution that could perform discovery on student records and employees in the case of a legal event calling for e-discovery.

"We wanted an e-mail archiving solution for Exchange that would automatically remove Exchange content and eliminate our performance bottlenecks," said Bowden. "We also needed an e-mail archive that would streamline any requests we get for discovery, which before could take us days to perform. Now with NearPoint we can search the archive in minutes. NearPoint's search features are just amazing and the ability to search and restore data is easy."