Friday, January 15, 2010

Storage Switzerland was briefed recently about Enterprise Vault (EV) upgrades for Exchange 2010 that address some of the concerns of Exchange admins and IT management. Symantec is a participant in Microsoft’s Technical Adoption Program (TAP) for Exchange Server 2010. Working with Microsoft, Symantec focused on identifying key features and enhancements that customers could benefit from after migrating to the latest version of Exchange Server.

Automated mailbox management

Exchange only supports archives that are stored on the same storage as the primary mailbox. Enterprise Vault (EV) can move archived messages and attachments to any accessible storage container, enabling email archives to be put on lower tiers of storage, including optical and tape. EV provides tools that enhance the retention policies in Exchange 2010, plus automatic classification technology which can enable data objects to be stored in appropriate archive containers, based on content, or deleted automatically.

Optimized single instance storage

Exchange 2010 offers users larger mailboxes, which could drive up storage use. EV helps reduce storage consumption by implementing single instance storage. This allows the archive to store one copy of common data objects, even between applications like Exchange and SharePoint, and file system documents. This technology can cost effectively increase the amount of data stored in the archive and thereby reduce the backup data footprint. EV also supports Content Addressed Storage (CAS) and WORM storage technologies.

PST migration

Exchange only provides manual migration of PST files and they must be stored on the primary Exchange storage. EV can perform an enterprise-wide search to locate, collect and migrate PST files to the archive automatically. This can achieve eradication of PST files from the environment and the associated issues with eDiscovery, backup, and storage. EV will also deduplicate the emails and attachments once in the archive, further reducing the storage footprint.

eDiscovery support

Exchange provides basic search capability and legal hold for Exchange only. Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator with Guided Review can search across the full archive, including SharePoint and file systems. It provides ‘roles-based’ search, enabling legal holds to content in the archive without requiring additional copies for each search.

Simple archived file access

EV users can easily find and restore older mail items directly through the native Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client or Outlook Web App. Also, Vault Cache allows users to access archived emails and files from mobile devices, or while working offline.

Data migration

With Enterprise Vault, files from SharePoint and network file servers can be archived, along with email messages and attachments. This consolidated archiving of unstructured data from across the enterprise can help get appropriate data migrated off primary storage and onto secondary tiers, reducing storage costs.

Storage Switzerland Take

With the explosive growth of email in organizations, Exchange represents a prime target for IT to improve storage efficiency. Since Microsoft has left some important functionality out of Exchange 2010, Enterprise Vault’s feature set looks that much more attractive. Data reduction with single instance storage between Exchange, SharePoint and network file servers along with better file migration, should help IT minimize storage consumption. Also, file access and mailbox management capabilities should improve user experience with archived messages and help with compliance requirements.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst