Introduction
In Exchange Mailbox Archiving Land there are very few products that offer the completeness-of-solution that Enterprise Vault offers. There are so many different things that the product can bring to your organisation, your messaging environment, and to your admin team. Consider these five things that Enterprise Vault can do for you
Searchability
Today people can search all their mails in Outlook, that's a given. They can search them from Outlook for Mac, Outlook Web Access, and even on their mobile devices. But what about the end-users with their two dozen PST files? How can they easily search that data? Will they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get some 'random' third party product to index the data, sometimes creating huge indices on the end-users laptop, which has to be rebuilt every time it goes through a hardware-refresh? Will they hotly pursue the 'I know I have that email SOMEWHERE!!' for hours and hours
What about the legal or HR side of the organisation? How can they readily search across multiple users mails? How can they search end-user PSTs?
Chances are that users will search for data for hours, and that HR/legal people won't be able to easily search across users data when required.
Enterprise Vault offers the capability to ingest all that old PST data using either native tools within Enterprise Vault, or third party products like PST FlightDeck from QUADROtech. Once in Enterprise Vault it is indexed, and accessible to users, and using products like Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator it is also accessible to those people in legal or HR that need to do those cross-mailbox searches.
Accessibility
Getting data out of stray PSTs strewn across the network of servers, laptops and desktops in an organisation is a huge minefield. With Enterprise Vault features like integrated search (within Outlook), browser search, Archive Explorer, and Virtual Vault, there becomes an array of options that can be offered to end-users of all abilities and access methods.
Accessibility doesn't just stop there though. Many organisations have acquired other organisations over time, and taken on board other Exchange messaging environments and merged them in to a large beast. The same sorts of things happen with Enterprise Vault environments. With the introduction of simple tools like Enterprise Vault's Move Archive, but probably with the use of third party products like QUADROtech's Archive Shuttle, archived data can be easily moved around as the nature and shape of the organisation changes (acquisitions as well as sales)
Mailbox Size Manageability
The infinite mailbox. A mythical beast? It is something that messaging administrators have talked about since before the early days of Microsoft Exchange! It gets a step closer perhaps with the introduction of Enterprise Vault and it's retention management features. Items once archived can have shortcuts created for them, these can be expired (ie removed from the mailbox) after a period of time, and the underlying data can be further expired (ie removed from the archive) after another period of time.
Third party tools have sprung up lately to help analyse mailboxes to help provide the infinite-mailbox. Tools such as QUADROtech's Mailbox Analysis tool help visualise the data-makeup of a mailbox and help determine whether the most appropriate policy is in place, or not.
These types of features help manage the size of live data in a mailbox better than ever before. So perhaps that unicorn of infinite-mailbox is now possible with some careful planning and management?
Storage-ability
With Exchange 2010 Microsoft removed the Single Instance Storage features in Exchange. I think that's a bad idea, and single instancing data, when done well, is surely a boon for storage administrators. Enterprise Vault has always done Single Instance Storage (known as sharing in the distant past) and since Enterprise Vault 8 that was further enhanced by using Optimised Single Instance Storage where data can be shared across Vault Stores, and across Vault Store Groups.
With the requirement of having good connectivity between storage locations it is now possible to share data across servers, for example, something that Microsoft Exchange never managed.
Storage-ability doesn't just stop there though, because there is also a wealth of storage mediums that Enterprise Vault can take advantage of. From the old stalwarts like EMC Centera to all sorts of new mediums like Cloud storage, the list of possibilities grows increasingly long with newer releases of Enterprise Vault. Data mediums can also be mixed, further pressing on the JBOD-style that is popular with storage solutions at the moment.
Future-ability
Storing data in the DVS format, as Enterprise Vault does (it's proprietary format) preserves this data for the future. These files can be absorbed in to CAB files, migrated to tiertary storage and yet still the items can be retrieved by Enterprise Vault (of course there is that super fast index which might remove the need for retrieval in the first place).
Future-ability doesn't just end there though. Many organisations now look closely at what they are doing with traditional backups, and disaster recovery plans, often looking for innovate solutions. Third party companies like QUADROtech seize these opportunities and provide fantastic products like EVnearSync which integrates tightly with Enterprise Vault and provides the ability to replicate Enterprise Vault data to another storage device
Future-ability is also happening from the end-user angle too. There is increasing support for Operating System, Microsoft Office versions, internet browsers, and mobile devices. The list grows steadily long with each version of Enterprise Vault.
Summary
Consider these five aspects of Enterprise Vault, and the additions that some of the third party products add to the final solution, and try to see if they relate to your environment, your organisation, and your business needs. There are many other things that the product brings to the table, so hopefully with this short list of mine, you'll get a head start on producing your own five touch-points that you want to improve on, in your environment, with an implementation of Enterprise Vault.
In Exchange Mailbox Archiving Land there are very few products that offer the completeness-of-solution that Enterprise Vault offers. There are so many different things that the product can bring to your organisation, your messaging environment, and to your admin team. Consider these five things that Enterprise Vault can do for you
Searchability
Today people can search all their mails in Outlook, that's a given. They can search them from Outlook for Mac, Outlook Web Access, and even on their mobile devices. But what about the end-users with their two dozen PST files? How can they easily search that data? Will they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get some 'random' third party product to index the data, sometimes creating huge indices on the end-users laptop, which has to be rebuilt every time it goes through a hardware-refresh? Will they hotly pursue the 'I know I have that email SOMEWHERE!!' for hours and hours
What about the legal or HR side of the organisation? How can they readily search across multiple users mails? How can they search end-user PSTs?
Chances are that users will search for data for hours, and that HR/legal people won't be able to easily search across users data when required.
Enterprise Vault offers the capability to ingest all that old PST data using either native tools within Enterprise Vault, or third party products like PST FlightDeck from QUADROtech. Once in Enterprise Vault it is indexed, and accessible to users, and using products like Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator it is also accessible to those people in legal or HR that need to do those cross-mailbox searches.
Accessibility
Getting data out of stray PSTs strewn across the network of servers, laptops and desktops in an organisation is a huge minefield. With Enterprise Vault features like integrated search (within Outlook), browser search, Archive Explorer, and Virtual Vault, there becomes an array of options that can be offered to end-users of all abilities and access methods.
Accessibility doesn't just stop there though. Many organisations have acquired other organisations over time, and taken on board other Exchange messaging environments and merged them in to a large beast. The same sorts of things happen with Enterprise Vault environments. With the introduction of simple tools like Enterprise Vault's Move Archive, but probably with the use of third party products like QUADROtech's Archive Shuttle, archived data can be easily moved around as the nature and shape of the organisation changes (acquisitions as well as sales)
Mailbox Size Manageability
The infinite mailbox. A mythical beast? It is something that messaging administrators have talked about since before the early days of Microsoft Exchange! It gets a step closer perhaps with the introduction of Enterprise Vault and it's retention management features. Items once archived can have shortcuts created for them, these can be expired (ie removed from the mailbox) after a period of time, and the underlying data can be further expired (ie removed from the archive) after another period of time.
Third party tools have sprung up lately to help analyse mailboxes to help provide the infinite-mailbox. Tools such as QUADROtech's Mailbox Analysis tool help visualise the data-makeup of a mailbox and help determine whether the most appropriate policy is in place, or not.
These types of features help manage the size of live data in a mailbox better than ever before. So perhaps that unicorn of infinite-mailbox is now possible with some careful planning and management?
Storage-ability
With Exchange 2010 Microsoft removed the Single Instance Storage features in Exchange. I think that's a bad idea, and single instancing data, when done well, is surely a boon for storage administrators. Enterprise Vault has always done Single Instance Storage (known as sharing in the distant past) and since Enterprise Vault 8 that was further enhanced by using Optimised Single Instance Storage where data can be shared across Vault Stores, and across Vault Store Groups.
With the requirement of having good connectivity between storage locations it is now possible to share data across servers, for example, something that Microsoft Exchange never managed.
Storage-ability doesn't just stop there though, because there is also a wealth of storage mediums that Enterprise Vault can take advantage of. From the old stalwarts like EMC Centera to all sorts of new mediums like Cloud storage, the list of possibilities grows increasingly long with newer releases of Enterprise Vault. Data mediums can also be mixed, further pressing on the JBOD-style that is popular with storage solutions at the moment.
Future-ability
Storing data in the DVS format, as Enterprise Vault does (it's proprietary format) preserves this data for the future. These files can be absorbed in to CAB files, migrated to tiertary storage and yet still the items can be retrieved by Enterprise Vault (of course there is that super fast index which might remove the need for retrieval in the first place).
Future-ability doesn't just end there though. Many organisations now look closely at what they are doing with traditional backups, and disaster recovery plans, often looking for innovate solutions. Third party companies like QUADROtech seize these opportunities and provide fantastic products like EVnearSync which integrates tightly with Enterprise Vault and provides the ability to replicate Enterprise Vault data to another storage device
Future-ability is also happening from the end-user angle too. There is increasing support for Operating System, Microsoft Office versions, internet browsers, and mobile devices. The list grows steadily long with each version of Enterprise Vault.
Summary
Consider these five aspects of Enterprise Vault, and the additions that some of the third party products add to the final solution, and try to see if they relate to your environment, your organisation, and your business needs. There are many other things that the product brings to the table, so hopefully with this short list of mine, you'll get a head start on producing your own five touch-points that you want to improve on, in your environment, with an implementation of Enterprise Vault.
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