Veritas Enterprise Vault

At the time we first implemented Enterprise Vault, there were no other significant players on the data archiving market.

VE is Very robust and has a good granularity on the archiving rules. The IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web. Have great speed of archiving data and your frontend is easier for users. The Retention periods could be set to keep archives for a certain amount of time and the automatic metric to choose the best form is a differential.

We evaluated Z Technologies and EMC archiving solutions. EMC archiving solution was not cohesive at the time. They had one for mail archiving and another product for file services archiving. I wanted a single solution targeting different platforms so that additional storage efficiency could be achieved. Z Technologies wasn't bad but a much small company compared to Symantec / Veritas. Their solution appeared to more difficult to configure and to setup. They had an AD syncing mechanism where it synced our production AD against a copy of ldap objects in Z technologies. did not like the fact that there was going to be another ldap repository.

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.

Using Enterprise Vault means having a system that is not directly integrated in your backups, and not tied to the upgrade kadence of your backup systems is nice. With CommVault or other backup driven software the upgrade cycle and user experience is not always tied to the desktop products so users can be left using older versions. In addition, CommVault and other backup based software often does not have good litigation hold and search tools.

We acquired servers from another company through an acquisition that had McAfee installed. It was difficult to manage any of the clients connected and the management server itself had to be restarted on a daily basis. I am aware of an alternative product known as Trend Micro, but I do not have any experience in the using the product or how to manage it in a enterprise environment.

I have not been able to evaluate other products.