Symantec Unveils Channel-Friendly Archiving App

Enterprise Vault 8.0 also features enhanced management capabilities, as well as an improved tool for searching archives for discovery purposes, said Dave Campbell, Symantec's senior product marketing manager for the product line.

The new application significantly cuts the amount of capacity needed to store archived items with a new single-instance storage capability, Campbell said. Enterprise Vault 8.0 stores only one copy of an e-mail or some other unstructured file regardless of the content or how many branch offices have access to the file.

This is important because customer storage requirements continue to grow while their IT budgets remain flat at best, Campbell said. "By enabling an intelligent archiving solution that allows customers to not only target what content to archive but also to single-instance store it, it's easier for customers to manage their storage growth," he said.

An end-user customer working with Denver, Colo.-based solution provider Advanced Systems Group, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he is currently evaluating Enterprise Vault vs. EMC's EmailXtender application.

The customer said that single-instance storage for archiving is a big deal to him. "It's a great idea," the customer said. "It helps reduce disk utilization."

Enterprise Vault 8.0 also features an overhauled version of Discovery Accelerator, the Symantec application that allows searching of archive databases for discovery purposes, Campbell said.

With the new version, the search function is run as a light client software to improve performance, Campbell said. Symantec has also added a "Guided Review" function, which allows users to filter the search results on-the-fly in order to more quickly drill down to the required content.

"So, if I'm searching for 'XYZ e-mails' in the archive, I may get 20,000 items," Campbell said. "So, I then use the Guided Review tools on the side to filter the results."

Symantec has also enhanced management capabilities with Enterprise Vault 8.0. For instance, files once archived are still dynamic and can be moved to different folders with the retention period changed automatically. Symantec has also added the capability to pause all services to do a quick backup of a portion of the archive and then automatically restart the applications once finished, Campbell said.

Solution providers will find Enterprise Vault 8.0 easier to install than earlier versions, Campbell said. For instance, Symantec looked at the best practices of its 10,000 or so Enterprise Vault customers from small businesses to enterprises to build an installation wizard that can have the application up and running in a couple of minutes in many cases, he said.

Such a capability will make it easier for solution providers to bring Enterprise Vault 8.0 to midmarket customers, and will allow them to quickly set up a proof-of-concept demo at the customer site, he said.

Symantec is also cutting the number of SKUs related to Enterprise Vault 8.0 and modifying the bundles to make it easier for solution providers to sell it, Campbell said.

He said it will be available in four main bundles: Storage Management Advanced Edition with core e-mail archiving capabilities; Storage Management Enterprise Edition with the ability to work with other types of unstructured content; and e-Discovery Advanced Edition and e-Discovery Enterprise Edition, which adds discovery tools and related capabilities to the other bundles.

Bert Shure, an account executive at Advanced Systems Group, said having the installation wizard and preset bundles will be a big help in many cases. "Symantec wants a whopper of a charge for installation services," Shure said.

The Advanced Systems Group customer said that while some of the new functions of Enterprise Vault look good, even more important is how the application looks compared to EMC's offerings.

"EMC's EmailXtender has the feeling that the user interface was written 20 years ago," he said. "With Enterprise Vault, things look exactly how and where they're supposed to be. It sounds like EMC isn't going to like [Enterprise Vault]."