Author: Ned Fairweather, Senior Consultant
Symantec just announced general availability for Enterprise Vault 10 – the newest version of its email and content archiving software. Is it worth upgrading? I think so and here’s why: The current construct of Enterprise Vault (EV) is a pure datastore. Symantec has added intelligence to the information stored as well as context to unstructured data. Social media archiving (pending Data Insight rollout) as well as integration with the cloud have also been planned in the release. The recent acquisition of Clearwell is helping bring Symantec’s best in breed archiving together with eDiscovery.
EV is looking to increase governance via content based searching and increase business value by providing classification. They are using RAIL (Rapid Agent Ingestion Layer) to achieve content specific abilities based on lines of business. Scalability is focused on the petabyte sized data stores.
Improvements are being made to event-based retention and expiry filters to enhance management of deletion for regulation and/or reclassification. Additional focus will be on solving the requirements for new cloud-based email systems outside of Microsoft, IBM, and Google. In addition to cloud solutions, pst file sprawl on file servers will be included.
Enhancements to EV 10 are as follows:
- Full 64 bit index with GUI vs. a few scripts to build on
- 6x faster searches
- Storage footprint remains at 12% overhead as in previous versions
- Support for Outlook 2011
The future of EV should make complying with legal team’s eDiscovery requests easier. Structured data archiving is being worked on as a partnered solution (i.e. Oracle, Informatica).
Getting back to whether or not upgrading makes sense. EV 10 has some great new features; however upgrade paths between some versions are not direct. Upgrades would need to be run from one version to the next to get to 10. Here are the details on supported upgrade paths: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH53174 as well as the official word on EV 10 from Symantec: http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20110801_02
