News

posted on 05 May 2008 22:00

Mimosa Systems has added a file archiving capability to its NearPoint product line, alongside its existing e-mail, instant messaging and backup tape content archive.

As predicted  Mimosa has started delivering on its strategy of providing a single logical archive for all business data with NearPoint Files Systems Archiving. The product delivers disk storage capacity and cost savings as well as enhancing both legal discovery response and compliance monitoring effectiveness.

By archiving a business' files in one place duplicate copies can be eliminated with access paths preserved through stubs, pointers in the deleted files location that lead to the preserved original. Mimosa calls this extending a file into the archive. End-users access the files as they normally would, while administrators will see the immediate benefit as the size of the file on production storage has been significantly reduced. It can release many gigabytes of storage capacity for more productive use and is a way of coping with constant unstructured data growth and reducing its effects.

Archived files, ones that are accessed much less often than front-line files, can be moved to lower cost storage, SATA drives for example, and this also reduced storage expense.

One older, less active files are archived the amount of data to be backed upon primary storage can be significantly reduced, speeding up backups and reducing backup storage capacity needs.

A property of NearPoint FSA is that the archive can be used as a resource for monitoring and verifying compliance to regulatory frameworks that businesses operate within. The provision of a single logical resource for compliance checking, covering e-mail, instant messages (IM) and file data simplifies the working life of compliance officers. Files of different types such as Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations and Adobe PDF papers can all be inspected and searched with a single command sequence. Retention and end-of-life policies can be set up and automatically applied to files.

Similarly NearPoint FSA provides a resource for a business' legal department to respond to discovery requests and carry out e-discovery in a more efficient and potentially very cost-effective way with communications and documents relevant to a legal discovery request identified through the in-built search functions and then preserved through a legal hold capability.

The product also has the traditional archive benefit of being able to restore lost or deleted documents.

T.M. Ravi, Mimosa's CEO, said: "With the introduction of this solution, Mimosa provides companies with the most comprehensive and advanced content archiving platform for email, files, and instant messages stored in a unified repository."

File archives are developing into unified repositories for all forms of unstructured information and taking on attributes of content management systems. NearPoint FSA is a prime example of this development trend.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}