INTRODUCTION
Enterprise Vault is designed to be a long term, highly scalable store for items of unstructured information. Now in its fifth version, Enterprise Vault delivers not only a scalable and robust storage system but also provides a wide choice of implementation scenarios addressing storage cost reduction and compliance driven information retention. The framework architecture allows Enterprise Vault to be populated by multiple information sources (Exchange, SharePoint, File Systems or customer applications) and, through the KVS Business Accelerators, provides seamless interaction for both organization and user exploitation of archived information. Enterprise Vault enables a secondary, and optionally tertiary, tier of storage to be used behind the primary information source and applies information lifecycle principles to these applications.
The situations that Enterprise Vault is commonly employed to solve include:
Application Storage Management: A major use of Enterprise Vault is to act as an online archive for older items that are moved from primary application storage (e.g. Exchange) according to customer-defined policies. This enables the message store size to be controlled and so allows applications, for example Exchange, to focus on their strengths, namely the dynamic handling of incoming information and accessing more recent and more frequently accessed items.
Regulatory-driven retention and discovery: Many organizations are required to keep all electronic information for long periods of time. This typically includes email, files share content, SharePoint content and instant messages. Enterprise Vault can be used in conjunction with Exchange journaling to act as a secure repository for items that need to be etained for defined periods of time for legal or regulatory reasons.
Upgrade, Migration and Consolidation: Reducing Exchange or file server storage requirements generally means that more users can be housed or supported on each server, thus allowing server consolidation. For example, controlling mailbox size leads to improved Exchange system consolidation benefits, especially when upgrading from Exchange version 5.5 to 2003. In addition to this, Enterprise Vault can also be used to minimize the pain of a migration or upgrade by first slimming down the primary store and housing the bulk of the data in Enterprise Vault during the migration. The import and elimination of PST files is the strongest example of a migration and consolidation exercise that can be undertaken with Enterprise Vault.
Knowledge Exploitation: In general, Enterprise Vault also acts as an “information warehouse” for personal and corporate data, which can then be mined as a knowledge resource using the inbuilt index and search technology. Special purpose products such as Enterprise Vault Compliance and Discovery Accelerators then offer solutions to specific problems such as regulatory surveillance and legal discovery.
Operational Excellence: A good example of Enterprise Vault being able to increase the operational excellence of any primary application is the area of SLAs for backup. Many organizations are finding that because applications such as Exchange are growing so large they are no longer able to meet their SLA for restore. With a majority of data being moved out of the Exchange stores these SLAs can be planned and achieved. In addition, end users can service their own requests for old and “lost” information without consuming help desk or administration resources.
