Likelihood to Recommend If I were speaking to a fellow Managed Service Provider, I would likely NOT recommend this product. There are simply too many other tools out there that are better hitting this particular market. And the pain points that we do have with them are especially difficult because of our business model. However in speaking to pretty much anyone else in IT/Disaster Recovery this is an enterprise tool built to handle anything you throw at it. UNC paths and linking backup servers to one another, the flexibility of the tool allows for maximum cost savings if you build it right.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros It is reliable and once it is up and running you do not need to worry about it. It is flexible; you can use it to backup on-prem or in the cloud. Backup and DR Read full review 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. Speed of archiving data was pretty fast. Read full review Cons Notifications - on the odd occasion something doesn't work, I get way too many email notifications! Explanation of issues - sometimes when there is a problem, the explanation is a bit lacking in the logs as to why Flagging of errors - sometimes minor errors just get a warning flag, and it doesn't really notify you that they are there. Read full review The search function in the vault does not work very well. Cost. If not planned diligently, it might add to the overall cost. Not easy get a expert to address the issue fast. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability It works great in our infrastructure, we have reduced the risk of losing information at a lower TCO compared to other solutions. The implementation process was precise and fast and upgrades have always been smooth. It delivers what it promises.
Read full review Support Rating Pretty good--I haven't actually had to call them much so it's hard to say. The box works well enough and most of my issues have been related to the rest of my network, rather than the appliance itself.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Arcserve [UDP] has stood the test of time due to its low cost-to-feature value proposition for our company. We have ultimately decided to move to a more MSP-friendly product in N-Able Backup, but Arcserve [UDP] kept us around for years with their reliable and inexpensive product that delivered above and beyond technologically of their competitors throughout all that time.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to keep our clients' costs low and add advanced features with no additional overhead for us in licensing. It does however cost us a significant amount of additional technician time to review backups each day compared to other products aimed in our vertical. Read full review Helps on the data management life-cycle, moving unused data to cheaper storage and/or deleting it after some time, if required. Also helps reducing the amount of data to be backed up on the active array. Read full review ScreenShots