Veritas Enterprise Vault

Very robust

A good granularity on the archiving rules.

The STUBS! If possible, just archive data and dont leave the stubs behind. They break easily.

Requires too much maintenance.

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.

Improve business process agility.

Improve compliance & risk management.

Automatic retention strategy.

Data Lost Prevention technology.

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.

Create internal/operational efficiencies.

Drive innovation.

Product functionality and performance.

Support still needs improvement.

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.

The last version I was involved in was version 10. EV FSA IE Stubs were not intelligent at all. It was simply a short cut which bought us a lot of flexibility on one end but lacked intelligence to do anything with it. Moving IE stubs from one location on the file system to another was also challenging as the permissions had to be synced up. There needs to be proven well documented process to walk operations through the details.

EV SharePoint at the time lacked support for archiving blog type content.

We used Veritas EV Agent to backup Enterprise Vault. However, agent based solutions lacked performance but setup was significantly easier. The best option is to use Snap Shots to backup your archive. There are a set of powershell scripts that can help with ensuring the vault stores are backed up using these technologies.

FSA IE shortcuts had no icons of the original file.

Reduced a significant portion of File Services data sitting on primary storage by 35%.

We were primarily a Notes shop and we started migrating to Exchange we took the opportunity to keep the Exchange mail boxes relatively small. In so doing all the data coming from Notes DB went straight to the Vault in the form of a Vault Cache for the client.

Archiving Email. All incoming and outgoing email is stored by Enterprise Vault and is easily accessible if needed.

Retention periods could be set to keep archives for a certain amount of time.

Paging through archives can be time consuming. The software seems slow at this. This was possibly related to our own server performance.

There are a lot of options to expand out in the tree. It can be overwhelming at first.

Storage cost was the biggest negative impact we have. This can be relatively small if you have a small company.

The positive impact was we were able to look up old contracts that may have been lost.

The ability to import PST files has made it easy to add email that Attorneys bring with them, and to move from our legacy PST archives to the Enterprise Vault system.

The Vault Cache means users have available to them in Outlook a portion of their Vault in the familiar Outlook tree, which means users feel comfortable working in the system, often transparent to the archiving going on in the background

It's a very robust system, often very set it and forget. We rarely have to do much more than monitoring and basic patching on the system.

The ability to search attachments, not just subject and body of emails. This allows users to find attachments, or words in attachments.

Implementation of the servers is a very detailed and precise process. You have to match Windows versions, Outlook versions, and Exchange versions for supportability, optimal performance, and best practice.

The system lacks effective scale out documentation and planning. Scale out often requires breaking the roles apart, and the documentation does not clearly define how to do this.

If you scale out, user location migration can be problematic for moving their archive vaults for email.

We have seen a significant reduction in storage both for Exchange and block storage (from PST removal) due to deduplication

Our users find the ability to search their archive, the archives of past users, and subordinates as a fast and efficient way of finding historical data.

The ease of use of Enterprise Vault does make the business units prone to requesting to keep archive data for longer periods, which drives up retention and data storage needs.