Enterprise Vault a great archiving product
Updated August 10, 2016
Enterprise Vault a great archiving product
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Enterprise Vault
At our company we implemented FSA, SharePoint and Exchange. We initially deployed FSA with the intention of reducing total cost of storage in our DFS File Server environment. Our environment was complex with multiple copies of the data set so using FSA reduced our storage foot dramatically. This also helped us address our inability to backup our large environment with our DFS environment. We later implemented SharePoint and Exchange archiving to further reduce storage footprint.
- 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.
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.