Mimosa Makes CDP Move

Email archiving specialist Mimosa will take the wraps off the latest version of its software tomorrow, beefing up its CDP capabilities and adding support for instant messaging and desktop archiving. (See Mimosa Adds $17M.)

The startup is pushing NearPoint 3.0 as a way for firms to improve their e-discovery efforts. (See Mimosa Supports Exchange, Energizing Exchange, Zantaz Enhances E-Discovery, Packaged Approach to E-Discovery, and Law Firm Taps Index Engines.)

Specifically, Mimosa is adding the ability to perform CDP and archiving of data held on public folders, a feature of Exchange which let administrators share files amongst designated end users. (See CDP Gets Broad Makeover.) The vendor claims that this will enable firms to quickly search the content in the event of a legal dispute.

At least one user says that he is keen to get his hands on this feature. "That is definitely a big advantage," says Andrew Gahm, network architect at Marlton, New Jersey-based Virtua Health, adding that he will now be able to search his public folders in exactly the same way that he searches his Exchange archive.

The exec, who is looking to deploy NearPoint 3.0 at the end of the month, explains that there are currently "a couple of Gbytes" of storage on his public folders. "It's a lot of data to recover if you lose it," he says, explaining that NearPoint 3.0 will now keep copies of this data, even if end-users delete it.Difficulties in retrieving email have already played a part in legal disputes affecting Intel and Morgan Stanley, and many firms are rethinking their email archiving efforts. (See Intel's Email Maelstrom, A Fine Mess, Mimosa Talks Up Email Losses, and Legal Eagles Seek Data Unity.)

Mimosa is also adding the ability to search and index .PST files, the files of grouped email messages held on individual desktops. "We're crawling the PSTs that may sit on servers and desktops, [doing] full text indexing, and archiving them so that they can be searched by end-users, recovered by IT, and discovered by legal," says T.M Ravi, Mimosa's CEO.

Mimosa's NearPoint 3.0 will also let users index and retrieve instant messages that are compatible with Microsoft Live Communications Server.

With these enhancements, Mimosa's closest competitors are EMC, with its EmailXtender, and Symantec, with Backup Exec for backup and disaster recovery and Enterprise Vault for email archiving.

Though both Symantec and EMC support similar functions, including IM indexing and retrieval, Mimosa is billing NearPoint 3.0 as an "all-in-one" product combining disaster recovery, backup, and email archiving. "Mimosa is covering the needs of multiple stakeholders," says Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC. She notes that IM support is a significant feature. "This is important in particular industries, like financial services, where you have to record client communications."At this stage, Symantec still has the edge on Mimosa in terms of specific features such as file archiving and support for Sharepoint, which are both offered within Enterprise Vault, although Mimosa says these are imminent additions to its own product line. "This 3.0 platform is going to be used to deliver solutions for file archiving in the next three to four months, and some period after that, for Sharepoint," says Ravi.

The basic list price for NearPoint 3.0, which is available in the next two weeks, is $40 per server, the same as earlier versions of the product. Features such as e-discovery for public folders and PST archiving are available as additional options, priced from $6 per server.

Mimosa's Ravi told Byte and Switch that the startup has four or five beta customers using NearPoint 3.0.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch