Among one of the busiest airports in the world, Miami International Airport is served by eighty airlines, which provide service to 150 destinations around the globe. Ranked first in international freight and third in international passengers, the airport supports travel needs for an average of over 648,000 passengers a week. To support this very active airport, Miami-Dade Aviation uses e-mail communication for many of its critical business processes, resulting in staggering data growth and management complexity for its IT staff.
To help control rapid information growth, Miami-Dade Aviation was constraining its e-mail users with strict mailbox size quotas. As a result, many users were storing data in PST files -- personal e-mail folders that store e-mail data on an individual's computer. Yet, PST files can be difficult to access, search and store, since they reside locally on individual machines, which can also pose an information security risk. Even worse, if a PST file becomes too large it can become easily corrupted causing significant data loss. Miami-Date Aviation initiated a selection process to identify a comprehensive e-mail archiving solution that would reduce server storage requirements, remove mailbox size quotas and eliminate PST files while allowing for fast and easy recovery. Miami-Dade Aviation selected Mimosa NearPoint with its PST Archiving Option and out-of-the-box 'one-click' disaster recovery.
"Mimosa NearPoint will simplify the storage management of our Exchange servers because it puts more control into the hands of our end-users," said Cesar Lopez, network manager, Information Systems Division, Miami-Dade Aviation. "Now our users will have greater access, search and recovery of their data, when they want it, without calling IT first. It also doesn't require the installation of any agents on the client machines, which reduces network management, interoperability, I/O and memory considerations. It is exactly the comprehensive solution we were looking for."
Using NearPoint, Miami-Dade Aviation administrators set policies that allow mailboxes on Exchange Servers to be extended to the NearPoint server using parameters such as message size, age, and mailbox quota. For managing offline e-mail contained in PST files, the NearPoint PST Archiving Option crawls and uploads PST files to the NearPoint archive, where they are centrally managed and searched for e-mail discovery. PST files can be automatically deleted after they are uploaded to the archive or remain as files managed by NearPoint.
The software significantly reduces storage requirements by moving attachments, based on policies of age and size, to the NearPoint server. The NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature allows Miami-Dade Aviation to define policies that stub attachments in Exchange while still giving users seamless access to the e-mail.
It gives Miami-Dade Aviation continuous protection of all its Exchange information. NearPoint preserves all Exchange information and allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook. In addition, NearPoint allows administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with a simple 'one-click' operation.
