Mimosa Systems, a provider of live content archiving solutions, has announced the availability of Mimosa NearPoint Disaster Recovery Option, a solution that provides automated disaster recovery for Microsoft Exchange environments to maintain application consistency and integrity.

Using the disaster recovery module, enterprise users can recover Exchange services to a local, remote or standby Exchange Server for rapid recovery in minutes, protecting and preserving access to critical Exchange and archive message data in the event of a disaster.

Mimosa Systems Disaster Recovery solution is addressing the core issue of ensuring e-mail availability and business continuity.

"We found that customers in disaster recovery projects vary all over the map," said Bob Spurzem, director of marketing with Mimosa. "Flexibility is critical and found that because of budgets one size doesn't fit all. If we can build one server on the disaster recovery side, we can replicate that for three Exchange servers instead of having three standby servers for the primary one. There is a cost savings not to provision three standby servers for the primary server."

In addition to flexibility, Mimosa's Disaster Recovery Option also offers ease of operation. The solution includes integrated disaster recovery monitoring, which alerts the administrator of any changes to the disaster recovery configuration and key disaster recovery status

"You can't predict the skill set that is on hand when a failover occurs," said Spurzem. "A real advantage on the front end of the product is we put in more screens, more monitoring to show that the status is okay so an operator can scan to see everything is operating properly and have the confidence that everything is set to go so experts dont have to be there."

Another aspect of the new solution is that it combines full e-mail archiving and both local and remote disaster recovery all in one product.

"The disaster recovery piece is a real critical one for managing Exchange and we made investments to provide complete Exchange management to go with archiving and local recovery," Spurzem added.

Other features of the Mimosa NearPoint Disaster Recovery Option include fast Exchange service recovery and continuous data protection for Exchange; application-intelligent replication based on Exchange log files that preserve data consistency and integrity by ensuring a corruption-free copy of Exchange databases at the disaster recovery site; zero-footprint disaster recovery solution without an agent or kernel driver software installed on the Exchange server that might cause instability and compete for CPU, memory and storage resources; and a simplified approach to Exchange-based data protection without the cost and complexity of wide area clustering.

Spurzem said that the channel is critical in helping end users manage their Exchange data. He added that channel partners that have expertise in Microsoft infrastructure and storage will see the Mimosa solution as bringing in a new technology that is important to their customers that have budgeted for it. "But the focus is on the value-added services on delivering a complete solution by configuring the system, have it run properly and add other high value services that they can provide."

The Mimosa NearPoint Disaster Recovery Option is sold as an add-on option to the base product and is available now directly through Mimosa or its channel partners.