Arctera Enterprise Vault vs. Sonian (discontinued)

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

Incentivized

We have had a couple of legal inquiries which required us to review emails for a user or users. Using the Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service, we have been able to perform searches quickly, narrowing or expanding the search criteria is easy, resulting in exactly what we were looking for. This has saved us with claims for collections, as well as a couple of legal HR matters. It is my trusted go to application.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sonian search is rightly praised for ease of use, scale, performance and accuracy.
• Sonian archive can be deployed rapidly without the need for costly professional service engagements.
• Seamless process to import PST files into the archive.
• Sonian has a high focus on compliance and governance which is reflected with their fast and accurate search function.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Speed is slow sometimes
• The Outlook plugin does not always find all emails when searching

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.

It performs as expected with no exceptions.

We only need support when initially setting it up. We really have not had to call for user or help support on this product. It has always worked and is always easy to use.

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.

Incentivized

Sonian is a pure SaaS solution and is easy to manage and use. It's cost effective and does exactly what it says on the tin

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We have been able to reduce a lot of store space by moving all PST files to the archiver.
• Users love how easy it is to find old emails that were deleted long ago.
• Some users now rely on this service