Mimosa systems (Nearpoint): horrible company and relationship: stay away!
I felt compelled to create this post on my blog due a recent experience I had with Mimosa Systems: An email-archiving solution that I had the misfortune of getting involved with for my school district.
Before I continue with this account, let me qualify myself, as to not risk the possibility of losing your attention, under the pretext of being “just another disgruntled customer”.
I am an IT professional for 12 years now, and have been specifically involved in system administration, engineering, architecture and design, for most of that period. I have implemented quite a few robust products and infrastructures: i.e: Exchange 2000, 2003, migration from Active Directory to 2000 to 2003, full implementation of VMWare vSphere 4.0, VMWare View 3.5 and 4.0, multiple SANs, Digital Imaging solutions (Viatron), Desktop Management solutions (LANDesk) to name a few. I have done most of those, either on my own, or with the assistance of an implementation company, or working directly with a manufacturer. All this to say that I have had enough experience to know the difference between a professional service, well designed product, efficient implementation, and the polar opposite of the former.
The reason I felt the need to write this review is because I (my school district) has been robbed close to a $100,000 from Mimosa Systems, with not so much as an apology, ok, not a sincere one at least.
The whole ordeal started back in November of 2007, when some random vendor (first mistake) approached us with the Mimosa Product, as we happened to be in the market to look at an email archiving/e-Discovery solution for our district. After a “great” marketing ploy, we were sold on the product, especially that we were looking for a solution that will help us keep our Exchange data stores within a manageable size. Mimosa’s promises to have message stubbing, and archiving of old message, as well as allowing users to upload their offline PSTs up to the archive, for online accessibility from any location, sounded like a great, and well needed offering in our situation.
We decided to go with Mimosa after all, and started the process of doing the paperwork. Something worthy of mention is the price of the product. When we first started our conversations with Mimosa, the price for Nearpoint was going to be close to $240,000 to cover all our users, with eDiscovery, and Message stubbing options. After a lot of negotiations, we somehow managed to get the product for $80,000!!! Yes, you read that right, from $240,000 to $80,000. Gives you an idea how much money they’re making off of this!
The process started with the professional services, asking us to send them information about our environment to get, in return, a sizing document for our servers and storage. We did this, and they sent us sizing document. All was fine and dandy, however, we weren’t able to continue with the project yet, as we wanted to do some cleanup on Exchange first, to avoid having to archive junk data that isn’t needed. So, we put the project on hold for a couple of months, then, came back to Mimosa when we were ready. Lo and behold, the engineer looked at the hardware that we had purchased to spec, and said that there is no way this hardware is going to work. This is now about 5 or 6 months into it, after we paid for the product with the first year of maintenance: still no implementation.
Since Mimosa refused to implement with our current spec, they decided to send us another sizing document, and ask us to upgrade our hardware, so here we went again, buying another set of hardware that would satisfy Mimosa. Of course, the process of getting that hardware took a couple of months, as it was a big order, which needed to go to bid, etc … meanwhile, the clock is ticking on our maintenance contract which we’re not using. We’re now getting close to 1 year, with no implementation.
To our surprise, we suddenly receive a quote for maintenance renewal for Nearpoint for some $30,000, from our vendor, which, by the way, hadn’t been in the picture through the whole implementation, and only comes back in when it’s time for payment.. very convenient. Of course, we raise a stink with Mimosa about the payment for maintenance for a product that we weren’t able to use, and after a lot of back and forth, we managed to get some 40% discount on our maintenance for that year. that’s still some $18000! In good faith, and in hopes to maintain our relationship, we paid the maintenance, and continued with our implementation.
A new engineer was assigned to us, who seemed disgruntled the whole way, always complaining that our hardware is still not adequate, even though it was ordered based on Mimosa’s sizing requirements. Throughout the implementation, the product would just never work. Usually, when I am implementing a product, I stay and watch the implementation engineer through all the steps, as I am the curious type, and want to know how things are done. I have to admit, that there were really no steps in this implementation, It was a trial and error at best, with multiple phone calls to the engineer’s backup to resolve certain issues. Pointing fingers back at the hardware was a constant issue, even though we finally found out towards the end, that the hardware was functioning fine, and the processes of the product were just not running, hence causing the hardware to look like it’s not performing at all! what a shocker! Of course, I didn’t really know that, as I was relying on the engineer to figure that part out, at least until I got some formal training on the product. Through the implementation, the SAN Storage space was taking up more than the sizing recommendation, even before we went live (which, we never did, by the way).
In addition to this frustration of technical nature, it was really hard to get the attention of the engineer between running processes, throughout the whole implementation, we felt like were on the backburner. Not to mention, the nonchalance that we were being exposed to on Mimosa’s part.
After some 2 weeks of attempts for implementation, and hours watching the engineer fumble through the implementation that never worked, I decided to take this to my director, and ask for us to pull the plug on the project. The fact that we had spent close to $100,000 shouldn’t be an excuse for us to be stuck with a horrible product, which, in essence is going to be just as important as exchange, and required about 3 times the management to keep it running.
After agreement, I sent a long detailed email to Mimosa explaining the issues that I have with them, and my decision to pull the plug on the project. This was received with an initial empathy, and a call from the director of their professional services department, who, after a lot of back and forth, decided to urge us to go to a 4 day training just to be able to use the product, and offered us a measly ~$2000 for training, even though, at this point, we were furious, and were asking for at least a partial refund of our maintenance. Promises were made about getting back to us with a solution to rectify our relationship, and we never got it.
A couple of months later, we receive another call from our vendor asking for a phone conference with Mimosa to talk about our situation. We agree on the condition that the only reason we would speak with them is for the purpose of a refund.
The phone conference happened, and to our dismay, we were faced with a customer relationship manager who had one purpose, and one purpose only: to “rectify our relationship”, and continue with our implementation, despite the fact that we specifically asked that this conversation cannot be about that. We finally asked that Mimosa would confer with their upper management and see if they would be able to refund us at least partially for a product that was so poorly sold and implemented. that was the least we had hoped for.
Unfortunately, there is a sad ending to this, with Mimosa getting back to us finally, and stating that there is not even a partial refund that can be issued back to us, and bottom line, we were $100,000 short. Mimosa has a $100,000 of ours and walked with it, worst of all, we don’t have a product!
You ask WHY I’m telling you this? Well, there are a couple of reasons:
1- When we were speaking with Mimosa, we asked that they rectify the relationship by refunding some of our maintenance cost at least. Since there was no chance we were going to continue implementation, we figured, if they offer something back, we could sincerely speak of them to any potential references, as a company who screwed up (which occasionally happens), and rectified their mistake. They have left me no choice. I am left with a bitter experience with them, with nothing at all to speak for. Sure, they will give you the excellent references of successful implementations they already have. That’s great! take my experience, and the successful reference, and make the decision for yourself.
2- which brings me to the second point. Though I made a mistake in choosing a product/vendor/company, I have learned from it. Some mistakes are better learned from others. So my reason for writing this, is to warn any potential users of Mimosa products to do their research before jumping into this.
3- I believe Mimosa is a company that has no business ethics whatsoever, and I resent that, and I think that it is unfair for other people to be conned into using them without knowing their way of business.
Funny thing is, in the same period we were going through the problems we had with Mimosa, I had 2 people contact me for references about Mimosa. One of which is a very big corporation. I was forced into giving a bad reference. Unfortunately for Mimosa, this is not the first, nor the last person that is going to come and ask me for references on products, one of which will undoubtedly be Mimosa.
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FYI - I am not anti NearPoint and would consider staying put if we can accommodate change needs - as everyone knows the saying about "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know", I will think about that long and hard before making a move decision. Nearpoint does however seem shaky as the support team behind the product seems light and small and my understanding is that they support MSX 2010 but are not testing 2013 as that brings a danger sign potentially telling customers they stopped working on it on the date MSX 2010 Rollup 3-5 came out.. You just know you are not on the cutting edge, but again.... it is running and is compliant right now and is paid for.
When we decided on it, Mimosa NearPoint at one point was strong and was in the magic quadrant too and we looked at them ALL. We spent a ton of time researching and we found the implementation OK other than the sizing frustrations which were right on (we had the same experience), but we went with what we thought made sense and it worked out OK. We have been using NearPoint for 7+ years and it has done the job, but it has been more and more painful recently which is why I am at this site). We used to have a better support experience, but since the various acquisitions they have put it into maintenance mode, which is code for we'll support it and patch it for now, but eventually it's going to go away perhaps 2-4 years down the road. We are evaluating options, but hear Autonomy's product is very expensive, and I spoke with someone I know there at Autonomy and found (she/he said as much and was helpfully frank off the record) that they are not positioned (i.e. priced) to be competitive for SMB's like ours (250-400 GB store, about 150 mailboxes).
Here is THE question - we have a single exchange 2007 STD 300+ GB store and as some of our offices have grown, and we are looking to add a remote exchange server. We could stick with it, migrate out and more to another product, but we have considered Microsoft's native archival options which we don't know much about, but as we are adding instances with exchange, now is the time to ask the questions. Here is our environment and requirements:
Single Exchange 2007 STD 300+ GB store in largest office (now looking to add remote exchange server due to growth).
Replicate all exchange via double-take for DR/BCP
We will currently only consider on premise solution.
SMB company (around 100 employees)
We always get what we need but like most in SMB financial firms - here we always have the budget for what we really need, but not the same as budgets for 10,000+ user solutions. Of course we expect the large company capabilities and power, but at an SMB price (always the challenge).
Should we stay or should we go (and if go - how and to what)? I might ask that I would love opinions, but would hope we can keep it from being too flamed as frankly I have heard most admins to go great lengths to display frustrations but moving can be a huge headache and involve great risk also. Our experience has not been too bad up until about 2010 or so when the acquisitions started and eventually you get left out in the cold (i.e. read "maintenance" mode). There is a big cost to move also so like the song says, should we stay or should we go now and........... Where do you go? You would have to migrate a ton of data back to exchange, hope it was not duplicated (we see that in NearPoint – doubles everywhere) and then re-archive it somewhere or, keep the old system indefinitely. Non-compliance is not an option so you have to use something. Interested in productive recommendations and I would love to hear constructive feedback about options, and even more about native Microsoft solutions. Not because they might be the best in this space but most importantly, you know they aren’t going anywhere.
I am so sorry you had this problem. We implemented Nearpoint in 2010 and it has been running great. When we have an issue it is usually resolved within the day and users find it easy to use. I hope you have resolved your issues.
MIMECAST!
I work for an email archiving vendor called C2C and our solution is known in market as ArchiveOne. We are more than willing to show you are solution and how it will match your needs. We are also offering a trade in scheme against Mimosa. If you are interested then please let me know.
This thread has been awesome to read. I am currently trying to pick an Email archive solution for an organization with 250 mailboxes. I am wanting it strictly for legal compliance and not for users to have access to larger mailboxes. One of the ones I am looking at is GFI. I have seen a few opinions on GFI Mail archiver but I was wondering if anyone out there has a more detail view or experience with this product. I would also be open to opinions about products that have "worked" for them (no sales reps please) I'm looking for a solution with Tamper auditing, fast searches, data integrity, and the ability to set AD permission on the archived mail.
Trav, Thanks for your comment, and I'm glad you found the thread useful. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a product that will work for me. Since Mimosa though, the product that we did look at were a combination of cloud and in house solutions. I lean a bit more towards cloud solutions, because I know how much hardware resources you would need to have an in house solution. The only in house solution we looked at that seemed viable, is the Barracuda email archiver. Of course, in reading reviews, most complain that the front end interface is pretty slow, and that is a big deal, especially if you're going to make it available to your users. The other couple products we looked at, are Google archiving, and DELL (EMC
Hi, sorry to hear about your experience. I have over 15 years in ICT sales and this story in our industry is typical. I am now an independent consultant helping organizations make long term strategic decisions. For those that are embarking on large ICT projects I recommend a few guidelines: 1. Get executive sponsorship from your provider, not just a sales junior 2. Get a least three references from customers in your industry. Even better talk to them and learn from their experience. 3. Get legal advice on SLA's, Statement of Work before signing any contracts 4. Have regular project formal updates - pay for this, it's worth it 5. Do a thorough TCO study on all project related costs In this day and age most ICT providers cannot afford to behave like this, the market is small and people talk. Most vendors try to put their customers first and build long term strategic partnerships by delivering to expectations.
Another product to be wary of is Zantaz EAS. I'm an IT Contractor and have worked for a company in London for just about a year. Zantaz were bought out by Autonomy, who have in turn been bought out by HP recently. Back just before I started working here Autonomy's support partner came in and did an upgrade to the system from 5.9 to 6.1 (so a compelte new release). After the install the eDiscovery component has been throwing up Oracle errors. We found out that the new release of their product isn't compatiable with Oracle! they made some changes to the coding of the application and well and truly buggered things up. Well over a year later we are now on release 6.4.0.2 and still no closer to getting a working eDiscovery solution. Which considering the nature of the business is a very important. We did think about migrating to SQL but as it was something forced on us we wanted the support partner or Autonomy to pay for the SQL\Windows licences and migration as we were told and have evidence showing that Oracvle is a fully supported product for EAS. As you can imagine this didn't go down well with them and they refused to stump up any money. So we are still on Oracle with a non working product and we are still paying maintainence! To add to that not only is the general perfomance and stability of the system very very poor, I have to reboot all the servers on a daily basis to stop them falling over. I'm looking at alternative products, EMC looks good but not keen on the fact that they don't have a demo\trial version. Wouldn't touch Symantec with a barge pole as we have Altiris in house and it is equally and unstable as EAS and the support and service we get from them is frighteningly bad. GFI looks ok but I would say that is for smaller companies under 100 mailboxes. I'm looking at C2C in the next couple of weeks and that looks ok. But like most here I have had my fingers burnt with Email archiving and I'm reluctant to listen to sales people telling me how good their product is but not letting me install it and try it out for myself. I think the future might just be Office 365 and 25gb mailboxes!
We provide a cloud based user and complaince archive. In addition to Exchange Email archiving, we provide archiving for SharePoint and File System data.
It was a real eye opener to read the experiences that many of you have had from a recognised vendor. I work for C2C Systems in the UK and I noticed my college in the US Mike has already commented. I would like to point you in the direction of a blog post on our website which explains the main reason there would seem to be so many issues in relation to the underlying technology. any questions please feel free to get in touch on +44 118 9511 211. http://uk.c2c.com/news-and-events/blog/email-archiving-technologies-mapi-versus-transaction-log-shipping/ http://uk.c2c.com/news-and-events/blog/why-mapi-is-more-future-proof-than-transaction-log-shipping/
Ok. So the response I wrote earlier about Mimosa - can i take that back? I believe HP now owns them. We haven't needed to call support in some time so now we have an issue and cannot get support to call back. In fact, going on 4 days - nothing. They cannot tell us who our account rep is. The "call center" basically said - we don't care, we just answer the phones and say "mimosa". wow. stay away! **side note: as I indicated earlier I will evaluate new players. I am curious to hear from others how they like barracuda. I agree 100% with an earlier comment - barracuda web interface is SLOW. I had to buy a new device because I called support due the interface being so slow and was told that my device was too old to run version 5(even though it was listed on the site as ok). Brand new device is a lot better but still sluggish especially when running custom searches. This concerns me as employees will be accessing their archived emails using their web interface. I would like to hear from others. Cheers.
Most Archive Solutions are not slow regarding the Database, because all Archive solutions are using a database. It doesnt matter if it is a SQL or any other Database. The key for speed and performance is not the database, it is how to work with a database and what kind of search server will be used. Thats the reason why we decided to use our own search server which allows us to search almost unlimited amount of e-Mails in seconds. Nevertheless the question would be what is slow? is it 2 seconds, 20 seconds or even more? We have replaced solutions were we reduced the search itself from minutes to seconds. But guess what we are although using a SQL database, the key for success is how to handle the database. This procedure does not start with the search it will start with the index already, usually a bad organized index could never ever be a preferment search device. Unfortunately there are to many companies around who claim to have an preferment archive solution. Everybody thinks archiving is easy because its just collecting data and make it available. But the truth is something else with more than 20 Years of archive experience we have deployed many solutions and we were trapped in the same technical incidents again and again. Read this blog, different manufacturers with total different technologies but almost the same problems! How could that be? The answer is simple, the foundation is not solid! Did ever somebody tried to build a house from the roof to the foundation? Maybe not but in IT you see that so often that the foundation is not solid to develop a easy to handle and preferment product. I feel really bad for the industry that companies could claim they are the market leader or whatever self declared experts what they are obviously not. What I really would like to do is showing that this could work in any environment with any amount of data! Everyone who is interested will get a free trial from us to proof solid technology. Anybody who would like to learn more about solid archiving technologies could contact me f.peplowski@artec-it.com
Not so - in fact at least one does not use a relational database to store the content, it uses a flat file structure making searches very fast and reindexing - while it is rarely needed - very quick with zero outage. With many Archive systems using relational databases to store the content, database links breaking causes significant outages; I won't even go there with NearPoint - it has all the problems associated with relational databases and rotten support. While using a search engine on mails is fine, it's not a compliant solution and a significant part of Archiving these days is compliance, particularly in the US and increasingly EU.
WORM? I never said anything about WORM. Did you misread what I wrote. I advised that yes, most systems use a relational database to store the content. At least on does not use a relational database to store content - it uses a flat file structure which makes searching for content during say, a compliance request much much faster. WORM is just one tier in a typical HSM environment and an archive suite should be able to automatically migrate content through the tiers using HSM policies. WORMM may well be the culmination of the migration of that data - where organizations are required to keep some or all of their data "forever".
Hello Dave, you are right compliant and e-discovery is what bothers most people these days. The database is just to get access to the content but to be compliant it takes a bit more than just a worm media. And here you will realize that a solution is rock solid or just hot glued! Any solution which needs a Worm media is not well thought believe me. There are easy ways to meet all the strict regulations even the SEC-Rules without having a Hardware Worm Media in place. To meet the legal requirements it takes a lot more than just a worm media to be compliant. Encryption, Digital date & time stamp and digital signatures in combination with TPM protection makes a solution secure and compliant. We have so many clients with so many different needs when it comes to compliance and legal regulation. Usually you will only be able to fulfill some needs because of the selected technology. But if you are standard based with a lot of security features you can meet any regulation. Beside compliance why don’t many vendors think about data security, almost any administrator could access any data. Or Log files are stored in the database as well, what if the database goes corrupt? Right Log files are gone! Recently we had a legal investigation at one of our clients; they had to prove that some e-mails never exist. Did you ever did a negative eDiscovery? It took us about 10 minutes to prove that those e-mails never exist. Compliance and ediscovery is more than just having a Database where you can search in, you need to prove the evidence of any record at any point in time. Just a view Vendors are capable to prove the evidence and chain of custody, the rest is just claiming that they can do this.
Barracuda, like many other archive suites is slow due to having to search an SQL database among other reasons. NearPoint SPA and FSA were withdrawn "temporarily" in August and May of last year respectively. In April this year, Autonomy have divested themselves of NearPoint support to Capax Global and no development for NearPoint has been available since September last year. Since December 2011, NearPoint for Exchange was been withdrawn from sale as well. Back in August 2011, we were told that a migration strategy from NearPoint to Autonomy's ACA product would be advised but of course this has not come to fruition like everything else they promised. Today, we are offering a migration for our NearPoint customers many of whom are quite clearly not happy with Autonomy, to an alternative product.
I finally got around to deploying the Barracuda Message Archiver 150. We are a somewhat small operation with a total of 130 mailboxes, using about 60GB on the Exchange DB. However, even after the initial import operation, the Barracuda reports that only 27GB out of 485GB are being used. This should give you an idea of its compression ratio. This shouldn't matter too much since they have bigger models if you so desire. I'm planning to keep about a year's worth of mail at most. Anyway, I also own the Barracuda Spam Firewall 300, although I'm not doing anything between the boxes, since I decided to just use journaling directly at the Exchange level. What I have noticed, though is that the web interface on the Archiver is noticeably slower than on the Spam Firewall. I'm talking a good 10 seconds between selections. That being said, it does come with an array of clients for Outlook, iOS, GroupWise, Lotus Notes, and even stand alone utilities. Access through the Outlook client is FAST. Not sure about this, but it appears that they reserve all the box's processing power for the searches. The main thing you should take away from this is that my users can stop bothering me with requests about an email they need restored from backup. They can now do it themselves. But, back to the reason why I got it in the first place. You have an option to add a share on the network and use it as secondary storage. This share mirrors whatever is on the box, so it works towards redundancy. From there you can just make your backups. Or, alternatively, you can set it up to access the Archiver via an SMB share and then back it up from there. In my particular case, I will be setting that additional storage share on a remote location, that way I have an up to the second backup in the event that something goes awry. Lastly, price. I purchased the smallest model, the 150. This has 500GB of storage, but it was enough for our operation, according to their sales rep. When I purchased I also got a bundle of 3 yrs. Energize updates, which are just updates to the firmware. Total cost of 2,660 + 216.12tax = 2,876.12 Sorry if I rambled a bit or if I forgot something, but I'm excited that this backup nightmare is over for me, and I am very satisfied with the result :D
Hey Alex, Thank you for your detailed review of the Barracuda archiver. This is invaluable to me, to get a real life scenario of usage. It's a bit of a bummer that the interface is even slower than the spam filter, because I honestly had thought that the the spam filter interface was already a bit slow. But given that all the other features are doing well, and you're happy with them, says something about the box. I also like the idea of external storage, though, that's only to duplicate the data, but not extend the storage, correct? (my understand is that extended storage is only available via iSCSI in the bigger model appliances only...I may be wrong though) In any case, thanks again for reporting back. I appreciate it!
Try the messageSolution product - there is an onine demo available. It's fast and doesn't need an SQL database at the back end. There are a whole pile of disadvantages with appliances, Barracuda included that you don't find with server-based archive solutions.
The single biggest users of .PST files are mobile laptop users who keep many generations (or worse, a single large) .pst on their laptops to access historical mails when they cannot be online and therefore a web interface or OWA is not available to them. Many appliance do not provide mobile users access to the archive when offline therefore do not get rid of .PSTs as they say they do. One of the biggest advantages that NearPoint had (according to their press releases) was the ability to store a offline archive on laptops therefore eliminating the requirement to continue storing .PSTS on laptops. In the final analysis, NearPoint's offline archive feature did not in my experience work. However, MessageSolutions offline archive does work and therefore allows an organization to completely eliminate .PSTs.
Thanks for your thoughts Dave. I'm glad you mentioned you weren't employed by MessageSolution, because I would've otherwise swore you did :) Though I do agree that some in-house solutions may provide additional flexibility, I don't agree on some of your statements regarding appliances. I speak at least from the features I've seen on the appliances that I've looked at. The integration is available with all major mail clients, as well as importing of PSTs, and getting rid of them on user's workstations (if you choose to allow the users to do so). The scalability, I agree, in that you would have to get a higher-end appliance to be able to connect it to external storage, but, it is definitely available (the ones I've looked at, had iSCSI connectivity for expandable storage. SQL Database was actually all embedded in the appliance, so no external DBs are required. As for your last point regarding the cloud, and being a true EIA, that may very well be, but that doesn't speak to its superiority over other products, but rather respectively the technology it uses (cloud), and the feature set it contains. For my purposes, I am looking for message archiving, dedupe (stubbing), eDiscovery, and PST import, which, most of the product I've seen had so far. That said, I will take a look at MessageSolution, just so that I can say I've done a fair comparison. :)
Here are some by no means exhaustive. Different appliances have slightly different disadvantages but some common ones: (1) Minimal or no integration with mail clients (Self service recovery). Practically all mail systems and many clients are supported by MessageSolution. (2) Offline archive access - doesn't get rid of .PSTs. MessageSolution gets rid of .PST files even for mobile users. (3) You already mentioned scalability but critically, appliances don't participate in organizational storage infrastructures - they are their own little storage island. (4) Scalability - MessageSOlution will support up to 20K users on a single server. (5) SQL data base required for Appliance. MessageSolution does not require a relational database to store content. Makes it a very fast, reliable search tool. (6) MessageSolution comes in Cloud, multi-tenated hosted and on-premise versions. (7) MessageSOlution is a true EIA not just mail only. The value of archive tools is their ability to archive all unstructured content (mail, file and collaboration) de-dupe and single instance with global search and legal hold across the entire environment. If you want a mail only solution today - MessageSolutions does it; if you want to add file and/or SharePoint tomorrow, messagesolution does it. The appliances in your life don't . On another note, I heartily endorse the negative comments re Mimosa (and their successor companies) It is / was an awful product that simply didn't work and now of course, there are many, many customers out there with orphan product sets. I would recommend anyone out there contact messageSolution and organize a trade-out. I am not employed by MessageSolution by the way.
Yes, I'm also curious about your reasoning. Granted, I can see the lack of scalability, but as I am realizing, you end up requiring a more robust (and expensive) piece of software if you go for the server-based archive solution.
Thanks for your input David. I will look at message solution. I'm curious though, you mentioned disadvantages of an appliance. Would you mind sharing some of those ?
I should have noted the size of user and mailbox base. I have ~1000 mailboxes and 1500 employees. Small compared to some but not a mom pop shop either. Yes, grossely understaffed - arent all IT shops ;) At the time of the purchase they were ahead of the others, mind you this was 3-4 years ago. At that time, I narrowed it down to 3 / Symantec Vault, GFI, and Mimosa. Each with their own pros and cons. GFI was great and inexpensive if purely used as an archive only solution. Vault has great features but I didn't want the application installed on the Exchange server, if possible, knowing historically Symantec can bomb and risk bringing down the exchange cluster. Since this time other products have matured nicely and deserve a re-evaluation. Typically the difference between medium size company and very large is only scale. You are still going thru the same process and determining the same factors - just on a different scale. Also- you are only as good as your staff.
I stumbled across and wanted to comment. I am my company's IT director and network engineer with 15 years of IT experience. A couple years ago I went thru the excercise of determining an archive/DA messaging solution. I reviewed several and narrowed it down to 3 vendors eventually choosing Mimosa. Although it was not cheapest it met more of the requirements and they could provide a test/trial in my enviroment at no cost. As an earlier post noted this was very important. Also as noted before hardware requirement cannot be understated. This application can be resource hog and we discovered this during the trial. When it came to implementation we did everything inhouse. Mimosa tried to get us to use a 3rd party but I felt more confident performing this ourselves plus it would allow us to learn the product inside and out. There were a few issues but nothing extraordinary. We worked with support and had a dedicated engineer when implementing. In has been in place for about a year and half now and works. We chose to use it as a recovery tool (deleted objects, email tracking) and legal discovery. For this purpose, it works quite well. I will agree with previous posts that there issues that seem to be recurring with the answer always being the same - "you need to create your schedules" or "why did you create them like that, it should be like this" ..even though it was the last support engineer that created that way. There have been a few instances where Mimosa has saved the day and a legal search for ediscovery would have taken a week if possible at all to only take a couple minutes. Lastly, I am coming up for renewal and will be re-evaluating this product to determine if it's best and most cost effective. I am also a barracuda user but only for Spam filtering and will look at them for achiving. They make solid products, have great support, and are generally priced reasonable. I wanted to post this in case others were researching to let them know not all experiences have been bad.
Thanks for your comment, Glen. It's good to hear that someone did in fact have have a good experience with them, and I never doubted that some people had success, or they wouldn't still be in business I guess. :) That said, I was looking for a solution that wouldn't have such a steep learning curve. Since you're the IT Director, and the Network Engineer, I'm assuming you're also either in a small company, or an understaffed one. Either way, you can appreciate the dilemma about picking your battles :) With a huge AD implementation on one side, and a pretty large VMware implementation on the other, and another 100 smaller services in between, that leaves me very little to no time to delve into yet another robust solution. I'm glad it worked out for you though. Barracuda is looking good so far, so if you ever go there, chime in back here to report your level of success and satisfaction with the product. Cheers,
Sorry to hear about your experience. My company, C2C Systems, provides email archiving and e-Discovery solutions, as well. We deliver software, but our repositories can be hosted in the cloud or on-site. We are on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Management. Finally, we use MAPI to pull mail from Exchange and/or journaling to ensure that every email is retained. If you are interested, take a look at C2C.com. Like others, we have a Mimosa "buy back" program as well.
My firm is another former Mimosa customer from their v1.0/2.0 days. Your story is quite familiar; we pulled the plug when the upgrade to v3.0 would've required a restore of all extended messages back into Exchange, and then restubbing to v3.0 servers. We deployed Barracuda Message Archivers last fall in less than 5 months from purchase to production deployment. Highly recommend--It was a clean, quick install and they just work, without constant admin intervention. Apx 10K users in my environment. Good luck.
Thanks for your comment! it's unfortunate that there are so many people that have had the same experience. I appreciate your review on the Barracuda Archiver, especially in a large environment, and after using it for a while. Hopefully this time, it'll work out for us :)
Alex, you got it. For your situation, even if Nearpoint was a good product, I would think it would be too big for your environment anyway. Barracuda has two different appliances, and I suspect their entry-level appliance may be perfect for your needs. will update this article when I have a solution that I'm happy with.
First off, thanks for the article. I've been having serious issues with Backup Exec 2012 (trial) to get it to work properly with Exchange 2003. Apparently it's a known issue without resolution so I started looking into alternatives. I found an article that suggested I use ntbackup for full backups and then using a recovery tool to restore indivudal items from those backups. One of those products suggested was from Mimosa: http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/product-reviews-2006/Exchange-Server-Backup-and-Recovery Anyway, after reading about your ordeal with this company, I am starting to lean towards my initial choice: Barracuda Email Archiver. I too have the Spam Firewall and am very happy with it. Please let us know if you end up implementing it in your environment, since if it works in yours it will work in mine (I only have 100 users).
Thanks for your commend Friedhelm. Hind site's always 20/20 isn't it? Regarding the testing before purchasing, the problem with that, is that, for instance, Mimosa, was just too robust, and had too many hooks in the system to be able to test it. I thought cleanup after testing such a solution would be a nightmare, if at all possible, even, so that's partly the reason why things went straight into implementation, after we saw the demo. I do understand what you're saying, even regarding hosted solution, and the cost associated with that. In my case, I do have to consider this, weighed against my staffing, given that my environment is entirely too big for my staff to handle fully, I have to sometimes make calls as to what would utilize in the best way possible, even if it is a recurring cost. In any case, at this point, we are actually looking at the Barracuda Email Archiver, as we already have the Spam filter, and we know their products work pretty well. Also, it is a self contained appliance, with nothing else required on the network. (like you suggested). Hopefully the ROI on this one will be fast, and since it's an in-house solution, the maintenance will only be the regular appliance yearly maintenance, and perhaps, any upgrades in the coming years (but of course, that comes with any in-house hardware anyway).
Hello Foreignkid, that sounds better if you dont mind i can give some more Information. Please feel free to contact me directly i can provide some recommendations. Friedhelm
Hello all, i run accidently in this blog and have to say we do have many customers with the same experience. What I don’t understand why is everybody buying or intends to buy something without having it tested on site. Are you going to buy a Car based on a PowerPoint or a brochure? Or are you going for a test ride? Please have in mind, PowerPoint and brochures are going to work all the time. We recommend to our customers to test the full functionality in their own environment, without interrupting the productivity. To solve the posted issues is so easy and the answer for that are standard based solutions. There are some around in the market who could do this. What else makes me smile is the pricing and sizing. But 20 USD per User seams expensive to me, even the mentioned 5 USD per User is too expensive. For a 2000 User environment I would not spend more than 40.000 USD plus support and Maintenance contract for an in premise solution. If you think to buy it as a service, be aware you are going to pay the solution multiple times. Why? Easy you are going to use your archive maybe for decades and each Vendor is calculating the cost over a certain period. Be prepared to have a calculated time of 5 Years, means you are going to pay for the 100% amortized Solutions 2 times in 10 years, 3 times in 15 Years and so on. When it comes to sizing the amount of User is a rough indicator but not the reality! To have a working solution it is more important to know how many messages needs to be processed in a certain time, this is what counts! We are really sorry, that so many companies are around and talk about knowledge and experience. But if you lift the curtain and you do have some archiving knowledge you will see this is only Sales and Marketing and not solid technologies. I can give you a real example: Customer A selected a well known solution for their archiving and eDiscovery needs. Installation was ok, but when it comes to eDiscovery this was a nightmare for the customer. 32 Million Mails in the System, 6-7 eDiscovery Cases per week, each last between some hours and 7 Days. So basically the customer could not handle the eDiscovery request with the solution form one of the market leaders. Solution: We brought in a system imported all 32 Million E-Mails and did the same eDiscovery requests. The Result came up all the time in seconds! Why is that? To many Vendors are just buying technology and try to implement that in their own Solutions which usually couldn’t work. I am in the archiving business especially e-mail Archiving since more than 12 Years and made quite a lot of experience. One suggestion what I can provide to you, never trust a PowerPoint or Brochure, they are made by Marketing specialists and the solution will work no matter what? If you think about implementing a Solution ask for a Proof of concept in your working environment! But be aware that nothing should be installed on the Client or Mail server this will kill you!
We currently run Mimosa as well. It works, but just barely. Everything that has been posted here has been my experiences as well. From the dog & pony show, to crappy offshore support, bad search results, angry users, sysadmin nightmares, etc. I would also like to add that every time I apply an upgrade we have issues and I have to spend hours on the line with their support. Millions of files in the IOR which is a nightmare to backup. Our backup is a 2 step process, making an image of the server then backing up that image. This product is garbage IMO.
Thanks for your comment Al. I'm not completely relinquishing blame on myself in this situation. There were certainly things I could've done differently, from that aspect, I consider it an expensive lesson learned. That said, There is a lot of complexity in our structured layers between our departments/purchasing/POs. Also, this project was prolonged quite long that it actually hit a yearly renewal, which we were forced to pay, even though we weren't yet fully implemented at that time. I guess that should've been my first red flag, that after 1 year, a project is still not done. Also, another item regarding e-discovery products that get rooted deeply in your exchange infrastructure, and of course, seeing the amount of work which was required to get a working solution, I was very weary about doing a trial of any product. (I don't have a luxury of a test mirrored exchange environment), so I had to rely on reviews, and evaluation of features. At this point, I'm more critical of that, and I will certainly be quite stringent on the SOW and its conditions. This company though, had they had any business ethic at all, would have worked with us to give us at least some partial refund, given that we had never used their product... ever, but they made the choice not to, and this is the specific point I cringe about.
Hi, It doesn't sound like things were too well managed at your end. You don't mention having done a detailed vendor comparison in order to find the right product that worked. Then you seem to have bought a product and paid for it up front, despite needing the vendor's PS to implement. You shouldn't need to have paid for the whole bill until the product was implemented to your success criteria. It is important to make sure you have entered into an agreement with a partner or vendor that sets out to deliver a solution to your business problem. Ask the vendor to provide you with a statement of works showing clearly what is in and out of scope, timescales, any dependencies on you -the hardware spec- and what the success criteria are. If they fail you don't pay. Always try to do this approach, unless you are purchasing something you are confident in taking on the risk of installing and managing - as with your VMWare skills This is fairly standard -speaking as someone who has worked for various global systems integrators (and rejected Mimosa as a potential partner once due to them being cowboys)- in the industry. Please don't take this as critical but I think its important to add some guidance on approaching engagements with vendors, to accompany your own experience. That said, in education, I've always recommended Microsoft's offerings as the licensing is usually a bargain, or even free in the case of the Online suite.
The company I worked for back in 2008/2009 also brought into Mimosa and the experience matches yours very closely. No journaling mailbox, backed by ex-Microsoft people, technically it sounded fantastic,s sadly it was far from it. The product was a nightmare with all the issues previously mentioned in your blog and other comments. The off-shored their support and development and it showed when they came to the second major release (which was more a minor release of the previous). In the end it never worked properly and I spent weeks picking out the install forms and other crap from Exchange. It's sad to see I wasn't only one bitten by this company. Ray
That's pretty unfortunate how many people are coming forward with the same experience. I had no doubt that there were some bad transaction going on there, but most people seem to have had almost the same events. Companies like this will likely not last too long. Especially that they don't attempt to mend relationships with clients or even former clients. If they think that a blog like this won't affect their business, then I believe they're mistaken. Most people go out and research products before buying them, especially ones in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sorry to hear about your experience. Have you ever found a replacement product that's viable?
Like others we didn't have budget to try anything else and I was so burnt from the whole experience. Where I'm working now they're using EAS that my college is currently looking after. I have to say I can't believe how much trouble they're having and how horrible the interface is for trying to retrieve or perform searches. When it was installed Autonomy said they fully supported Oracle, since the install (that Autonomy performed) searches don't complete properly along with a range of other problems. Their support has pointed it at Oracle being the issue and said it'll be fixed with the next release... in March.(This has been going on since last year) So now the company will be spending a fortune on changing to MS SQL (new licenses required) and they want to charge again for the install. Just like Mimosa all over again... If EAS is anything to go by, not much has changed in the world of Archiving in the past 4 years.
That's pretty sad. I guess bad business is in the air :-/ If I can help it, and it is viable, I think I'm going to try to shoot for a hosted solution for e-Discovery. After Mimosa, I realized that it was too much of a beast, and I don't have the in-house resources to manage it.
A sneaky vendor from an IT services company went around me against my orders and recommended Mimosa to my manager. I was vocally against the project the entire time. Since I am the Exchange admin, I was forced to work with Mimosa to implement this. It took a year to get it running for 4000 users. Very similar story to yours. It's mostly working now, but we continually have issues with it, just generally poor performance, and I have to reboot it a couple of times per week. The users hate it, and it takes a lot of my time to keep it running. Every time I need support from Mimosa (now under HP), they want to escalate to "paid support" to apply patches or something, but I always argue them into providing that for free. I'm looking casually for another product, but am extremely fatigued with working on email archiving, so I dread any project to migrate from Mimosa to something else.
Sorry to hear about your experience JJ. Sometimes, I think it’s worth it to cut your losses, and break the ties, but it doesn’t look like you had any say in making that call. From all I’ve been hearing about them, it’s been consistent with what I’ve posted here. So I stand by my opinion. I am also looking for some alternatives, for 4000 users, I’m not sure what would be viable for you. I hear good things about the Barracuda Email Archiver, though not sure if it’s scalable to your size. Haven’t checked it out. Google has a hosted solution as well, and Dell has both a hosted, and in-house solutions. Good Luck with your search!
ok here is more on messagesolution, I am thinking about them for claming a very good performance (20000 mailboxes on just one server) and a low price, I also saw 400+ votes on MSEXCHANGE.org - so I assume they are ok: http://www.msexchange.org/software/Email-Archive-Storage/MessageSolution-Enterprise-Archive-E-Discovery-Suite-for-Exchange/Comments/ will ring them for a quote, I saw on the site Express was in 2006 5$ per user so I hope it didn't go up that much .. lol http://www.messagesolution.com/pr.03.10.06.htm they also do bit discounts for orgs like yours, I think the only very good benifit for me to use inhouse sol, is to make use of the HW we got.
Thanks for the reference regarding messagesolutions. I will check them out and see how they compare.
oh yes, the good thing that we have many sites, each with 2000 so whatever we will go for, we will implement 1 site at a time to make sure things are good before going for the total sum :)
I've never heard of messagesolution. That doesn't mean that they're automatically bad though :) Regarding Mimosa. Their server spec was one thing in the beginning, and when we started , ended up being something completely different. In fact, I had to halt the project, to re-purchase the hardware according to the "new" spec", and that delayed my project by about 3 months already, and even then, they were complaining to me that their product is not functioning as efficiently as it should, because my hardware isn't powerful enough. Mind you, I had BEASTS of servers setup for this, with a 4 Gb 15K SAS enterprise SAN For storage, that's of course, not to mention the storage and maintenance required, which ended up being more than exchange itself. (because of all the components needed). That's actually one of the main reasons why I'm thinking to go with either an appliance, which is all self contained, or a hosted solution. But in my case, I just don't have man power to maintain so many components (I'm a under-funded --non-funded(??)-- School District in the US. Regarding the trial on 4000 mailboxes. I don't know how you're going to do that. In most cases, These solution would require some changes to your Exchange environment, and to your AD, and perhaps schema sometimes. Do you really want to make these changes for every product that comes in just to test it out? (I'm pretty sure you don't have a lab with 4000 mailboxes in it :) )
I came across messagesolution and reading more and more user reviews now, mostly everyone is happy from them, I'll probably go ahead and ask for a demo - will see if I can test it in one of the sites 2000 users, and see how it goes, most of the online records says they can do up to 20 000 mailboxes on the same server (not sure if that is practical) Mimosa said for 4000 users they need 2 powerful servers (was that the case with you too?)