The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability, and they provide fast access to archive data and low cost.
$0
Per GB Per Month
Veritas Enterprise Vault
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Veritas Enterprise Vault is a file archiving option.
If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.
I recommend Enterprise Vault, especially over native Exchange archiving when: 1. You have, or may need litigation holds and searches 2. There is a need to archive and set defined retention periods for Journaling 3. You have lots of duplicate large emails that you want to get deduplication of 4. You need/ want to be able to search attachment in addition to emails 5. You want or need Litigation searches or archive retention to be handled by a team separate from your Email team
EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web.
EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage.
EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface.
We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports.
Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.
I haven't research any other software against Enterprise Vault. Office 365 automatically has archiving capabilities that we use in the cloud. In comparison to Office 365, I'd say Office 365 comes out on top. For one thing, we essentially don't have to manage it. It also seems to preform better. However, Enterprise Vault does very well if you have an on-premise email solution.
We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.
