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.

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.

Journaling of emails

Archiving and single instance storage

Searching the archive

Speed of importing PSTs

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.

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.

It works fairly well with Outlook so users don't necessarily know an email has been archived.

It lets us set up groups with different retention categories. For example, we allow our users to keep email for 3 years. After 3 years, it will get purged on its own. However some mailboxes need to keep all email for 7 year for audit purposes and it lets us do that.

We use Enterprise Vault to archive mailboxes for people who are no longer with the company to preserve them. We can give access to a user if they need access or export into a PST file if someone outside the company needs access to it.

We struggle with backups. It's very delicate in that Enterprise Vault (EV) backups must run after Exchange backups run. Given the size of Exchange and EV, it sometimes gets backed up when the full backups run since they run out of time.

Because backups can become a problem, it has a trickle down effect and stops when emails are actually archived.

Like any Outlook plug in, there can be problems if the plugin stops responding and Outlook disables it.

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.

Symantec Enterprise Endpoint Protection is a solid antivirus client. It has protected our organization from hundreds of disastrous infections

Symantec Enterprise Backup Exec has made backing up our remote sites and managing them effortless

Symantec Enterprise System Recovery has allowed us to take system images and stand them up quickly at our DR site

Symantec Endpoint Protection could have an easier to use reporting module. It is not intuitive at all to use

Symantec Backup Exec could have better pricing on extra options

Symantec Enterprise could have a better centralized management server option

Single instance storage is an important feature. Despite the cost of storage going down commercially, data center storage is still rather costly and email has exploded in its sizes across the board. Microsoft has done away with single instance storage in their products despite the fact that email is commonly sent to multiples and groups of people.

Giving structure to email is what Enterprise Vault does. Since email has an unstructured database, structure generally helps for faster searches and indexing. With a well tuned EV system, excellent and complex searches can be obtained.

Symantec has always provided excellent Technical support to their EV product. I have always been pleased with their support when I have been deeply perplexed by an issue.

Enterprise Vault is a complex product and requires good administrative support. This can be tough for short staffed companies needing a system that is more "setup and forget" while working other other IT systems. I wish EV was a bit more easy to administer.

Be careful about the Vault Store choices you make. There are some proprietary storage systems that EV supports that modifies they way items are stored. (like, Hitachi Streamer Storage, HCP). If you ever need to migrate away from one storage system to another - do not use proprietary formatted vault storage systems. If you ask me, Symantec should not certify any storage system that uses a proprietary format.