Metrolina Uses Mimosa

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Mimosa Systems, a leader in Live Content Archiving solutions, today announced that Metrolina Greenhouses has deployed the next-generation Mimosa NearPoint content archiving solution for rapid information discovery, retention, protection, and recovery of its vital email data.

With 160 acres of heated greenhouses, the Huntersville, NC–based wholesale plant company maintains the largest automated single-site heated greenhouse facility in the world. The firm’s total site capacity—including planted annuals and hanging plants—is 325 acres. Now 35 years old, Metrolina distributes all along the East Coast, from New York to Florida, supplying a broad range of flowering plants to such retail giants as Loew’s and Wal-Mart, and employs 800 people, a 100 percent increase in employment since 2000.

The company’s rapid expansion has spurred growth in its email volume to a hefty 30 percent per year, with email boxes averaging six gigabytes. Metrolina is hardly alone in dealing with this kind of exponential growth of data. According to IDC’s Digital Universe study, the amount of data stored has grown fifty-fold in the past three years. Businesses are turning more and more data into useful information, and that trend, combined with increased regulatory and legal accountability, has compounded the problem of how to store, manage, archive, and ensure the safety and security of all this data.

“The size of our users’ email boxes had gotten out of control. We had no intelligent way for end users to search and recover email. So user requests got filtered to IT, diverting IT from critical-path activities,” said, AJ Klum, network operations manager, Metrolina Greenhouses. “This was seriously threatening our ability to do business; email is a critical application for a number of transactions, including contracts and customer orders. Many days we close $2 million in business and we absolutely can’t go down. We needed to create a robust, redundant environment to archive emails and provide one-click disaster recovery, so our 24x7 operations are not jeopardized.”

Mimosa Systems Inc.