Symantec Enterprise Vault

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with two representatives from Symantec to talk about their Enterprise Vault archiving product.

As paper based systems slowly meet their demise, storage requirements and the need for scalable archiving have boomed within businesses both large and small.

Currently I am working on a large account that employs no means of file/email level archiving.

The solution is simply to buy more disk which in turns pushes the backup window out over the edge it is already clinging to.

Welcome Symantec to the stage!

Having already seen numerous software archiving solutions such as EMC Disk Xtender & CommVault/Simpana I wasn’t expecting to be dazzled by the technology however I did leave the meeting suitably impressed by their offering.

The product is driven via a 32bit application which can exist either as single node or as part of a cluster and is referred to as the Enterprise Vault server. This server will have access to different tiers of storage which are used to archive emails or files and ultimately reduce the physical disk requirement on the servers hosting the application data/functionality.

Security and policies are integrated with active directory so logical groupings are easily achieved and managed E.g. individual & group archives to mimic departmental structures.

The first item covered was Email archiving. This came in the form of a roll-out desktop client (Approx 4Mb .msi) which integrates itself with Outlook; connectivity is achieved through MAPI so there is no need for changes to the Exchange Server itself and syncing is done via a secret message within the users mailbox.

Interesting points:

*For mobile users a local cache of the Vault servers user contents is kept on the laptop

*Ability to search at multiple layers within Email: Message Body to Attachment to Sub Attachment (.zip contents)

*Attachments are kept as pointers within the message and automatically retrieved from Vault server storage at the request/double click of the user

*Has the ability to assist in email version migrations (e.g. Exchange 2007 --> 2010) by creating a transparent archive.

*“.PST search and destroy”... well not quite, but it can automatically go out and search/recover sprawled .PST files and consolidate in to the vault without interrupting the end-user experience.

The next was file archiving which was much simpler in comparison but used the same policy based retentions mechanisms. These retentions can be set at an organisation, group or individual level depending on compliance requirements of the business.

Interesting points:

*At the file system, files can be viewed as their actual size or pointer size when viewing the properties of the selected file.

*Ability to deliver files direct to the desktop or inflate on the server with a policy re-run required for delivery back to the vault.

*Restrictions can be placed on vault contents such as elimination of .mp3 files.

Recommendation for Single Node Deployment in virtual environment:

*Win 2KXXX

*2 x vCPU

*4Gb RAM (32bit limitation)

*Microsoft SQL backend for metadata

*SAS disk for index & SATA for archive (approx. 12% of archive is equal to the index size)

In summary I found Symantec Enterprise Vault to be a simple solution to an often complicated problem, with smooth integration and little of no interruption/training for the end user. When the project comes to fruition I will be sure to post my experiences here and provide a more in-depth review. 

For further information, please see the following data-sheet: http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-ev9_archiving_DS_20465026-1.en-us.pdf