Pennsylvania District Bolsters eDiscovery Capabilities with New Archiving Solution
The Chichester School District of Boothwyn, PA has chosen the Mimosa NearPoint content archiving system for its data archiving needs, including record retention requirements, e-mail management, and compliance with electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, regulations, which the United States State Department issues to govern the search and recovery of electronically stored data for use in civil and criminal legal cases.
CSD, which serves 4,000 K-12 students and employs 700 staff, had already had a large and functionally elaborate network, including 40 servers, an HP Procurve backbone, and a NetApp StoreVault SAN designed to support its data backup applications. However, with recent growth in e-mail traffic averaging 35 percent per year, as well as significant annual growth in data storage necessary to comply with various state and federal requirements and regulations, the district simply needed a larger and more efficient system to support and simplify its storage and recovery needs.
"We found that eDiscovery requests could bury our IT staff for up to two weeks," said Tim McGrath, senior network administrator for CSD. "We had to restore old Exchange backups from tape in order to search for requested information. The process was like finding a needle in a haystack--with no guarantee we would find what was needed." He said the NearPoint application was the only software that could simplify eDiscovery, eliminate the limits on e-mail storage, and reduce overall storage needs in one comprehensive solution without adversely affecting the district's Exchange server.
Chichester School District serves students in four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school.
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