An argument for email archiving

A growing risk in litigation, it is more important than ever that corporations understand what their email says and where it is stored. According to Kevin Crane author of Designing a Document Strategy, as email becomes the predominant mode of business communication, risk associated with exposure of corporate and employee behavior, and theft of proprietary information will increase greatly. Access to email and awareness of usage is paramount.  However, research reveals that e-mail administrators require an average of 1.8 hours to recover a message if it is recent, and 11.2 hours to recover if it is over a year old.

Symantec Enterprise Vault as an email archiving solution overrides this time-consuming collection process.  It provides companies with visibility into the discovery and management of their electronic data by compressing, indexing and deduplicating electronic data. It is capable of reducing corporate cost and storage space by up to 60-percent.

Hotfix for Symantec Enterprise Vault

Symantec recently announced a cumulative hotfix for Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0.1, Build 1073 for Microsoft Exchange. In some cases, certain types of Active Directory objects, when added to a Distribution List which was later used as a recipient of an Exchange journaled item, could have been incorrectly identified as a group object. This resulted in Enterprise Vault event log warnings and a possible backlog of items in the target journal mailbox. Read more about the hotfix solution and how to install it in your environment. If you require assistance, contact evpro@us-analytics.com.

New update in Symantec Endpoint Protection

This week Symantec Corporation offers a look into the new version of Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition.   Version 12 provides users complete protection against malware with seamless system integration and it includes numerous fresh features.  Updates to SEP include Mac support and Sonar 3, a behavioral engine that monitors threats in real time according to 400 application behaviors.

Read more and sign up for the beta version of SEP 12 at: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/sep-12-announced

Measure twice, cut once: Deploying Symantec Enterprise Vault in Large Environments

By Scott H. Senior Consultant

Introduction

Symantec’s Enterprise Vault is the leading content archiving and discovery application on the market today. It’s the only application in its category to reside in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant.” Enterprise Vault is a relatively straightforward application in functionality and deployment. It archives content from Exchange Servers, File Servers, SharePoint Servers, Domino Servers… as well as other platforms.

When Enterprise Vault archives something, it connects to the target platform via its native protocol; Exchange-MAPI, File Server-SMB, SharePoint-HTTP, Domino-Notes RPC and so forth. Once the connection is made, Enterprise Vault copies, compresses, de-duplicates, indexes, and creates an HTML rendering of the archived item. Enterprise Vault can also leave a shortcut on the archiving target so that end users can easily retrieve the item. When deploying Enterprise Vault in a relatively small environment, the deployment is pretty simple. When deploying in environments of 100K Users, the deployment becomes significantly more complex. Outlined below are the reasons for this additional complexity.

Business Drivers

As with any application it is very important to define the Business Drivers or “Pain Points” that you are trying to address. This becomes more important and more complex in very large deployments. There can be no worse Project Failure than to discover that the Project Goals we not properly defined…

After deployment

After a multiple year deployment, this failure is significantly more acute. Also, when working in an environment of this magnitude, there are more stakeholders, sponsors, and customers than in a small environment. Getting all players to articulate and agree on their expectations can be very challenging. Without this first and most critical step, the project is setup for disappointing results. Legal, Human Resources, Messaging, End Users (with their diverse requirements) need to come to an agreement before the project starts.

Supportability

In addition to business drivers, an organization must consider the resources necessary to support the application. The more pervasive the visibility of the Deployment, the more stress placed on the support infrastructure. It’s important to keep product functionality as simple as possible. This will keep support requirements lower.

A couple of examples:

Discovery Accelerator: Keep the end user experience simple by giving your customer as few variables as possible to manipulate. It’s possible you will have more than one customer database. Don’t force users to choose which database they will use. Ensure that end users only have access to the archives they really need to search.

Outlook: Enterprise Vault has many options that can be provided to the Outlook User. In general, the fewer options made visible, the better. Transparency is the key. It’s ideal to have an end-user experience that closely resembles their original Outlook View. You can take advantage of Provisioning Groups to facilitate this simplicity.

Scalability

Without question, this is the most critical consideration in very large deployments. With Vault Store Partitions over 100TB and Index Locations over 50TB after a few years, this creates scalability issues that are simply not seen in typical deployments. The potential issues are numerous:

• Storage Performance – It’s vital that the storage platform can handle the throughput required by millions of messages per day. Index Volumes must have adequate IOPS to allow for the volume of Discovery Searches, while keeping up with day to day disk writes required by archiving. Archiving this volume can also press the requirements for the number of items in a file system. It’s important to roll-over Vault Store Partitions often enough so as not to exceed this threshold.

• SQL – The number of databases along with the database performance requirements make designing adequate SQL Servers (number and performance) essential. In addition, the databases can grow to be particularly large. The Custodian Database can grow to more than 1-2TB. This can be a challenge to SQL DBAs. The Discovery Accelerator Customer Database (s) growth can be challenging as well. The number of Fingerprint Databases (Vault Store Groups) and the performances issues inherent to them must be balanced with the Storage Savings gained with Optimized Single Instance Storage.

• Backups – The amount of data that must be backed up will challenge most organizations. Very large Vault Store Partitions, Indexes and SQL databases will require careful planning to ensure the RPO and RTO Goals required by your organization. • Failover/HA- Because Support of a large Deployment will be demanding, it’s imperative to plan for robust failover, High Availability, and Disaster Recover. There are multiple options to accomplish this. Microsoft Cluster Server, Veritas Cluster Manager, VMware DR Options easily enable this. There are numerous replication tools from storage vendors.

Summary

Measure twice; cut once, the carpenter said. When deploying Enterprise Vault in a large organization, this is more relevant. It’s vital to engage in a disciplined Project Management Methodology; Design, Test, Pilot, and Rollout. Also, find resources who have done this.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 and the Archiving Misconception

Jason J. Senior Consultant

With the release of Exchange 2010, I’ve heard an incredible amount of buzz regarding their archiving feature.  When your career centers around the world’s number one email archiving product, people tend to ask you questions when Microsoft decides to dip their ten-ton toe into your waters.  The bulk of the curiosity, of course, centers around whether or not Symantec should be worried.  More specifically, it begs the question,

“If Exchange has its own archiving, why should I bother buying extra software?”

Well my friend, that’s a very good question.  Seeing as the answer might have me training for other work, I figured I’d better do some research.

What I’d found was rather typical of any first attempt Microsoft makes at an application or feature:  Namely, it falls short of its goal.  Not to say that there aren’t some good aspects of Exchange 2010 archiving mind you; the retention and discovery features seem to be quite innovative and a massive improvement over Exchange on its own.  Unfortunately, that’s where the archiving functionality ends.  One of the most critical components of archival and content management, that of storage management, is left out of the Exchange Archiving equation.

When it comes to archiving, the best products are the ones that provide a wide range of storage options.  We’re dealing with centralized control of a company’s unstructured information after all, and these days that sort of data easily runs into the Terabytes for even the smaller organizations.  If you’re forced to stick to a certain type of storage – particularly the more expensive, higher performing storage – for data that isn’t necessarily accessed that often, you are essentially wasting money in hardware you don’t need.

With Exchange 2010 archiving, the ‘archive’ provided for each user mailbox is essentially an extra mailbox.  This mailbox, surprisingly enough, not only has to reside on the same storage device as the user’s mailbox, but in the same Information Store as well!  I find this particularly dumbfounding, as Mailbox Archiving was originally designed to keep information store sizes as small as possible.  The Information Store is a database, after all, and a database simply performs better when it’s smaller.  It seems incredibly counter-intuitive then, to double your mailboxes within a store, call them archives, and then encourage email hoarding by dumping older emails into those secondary mailboxes.  No matter the claims Microsoft makes as to their information stores handling much more capacity, I still can’t see it as a good idea to encourage IS growth!

All other features aside – And I could easily argue that Enterprise Vault outperforms the new Exchange archiving features – this Exchange storage issue is a deal-breaker as archiving solutions go.  Enterprise Vault’s ability to archive email and other content to flat-file storage and away from database structures affords it a much greater capacity per server, while allowing for much cheaper, lower-performing devices than could be viable on an Exchange 2010 server.  Taking into account the extra Enterprise CAL’s involved with their archiving and the extra servers and storage required, organizations can still see significant ROI’s when utilizing Enterprise Vault’s archiving.  Add to that the advantages of compression and single-instancing across all other types of Enterprise Vault archiving, and the storage savings becomes that much more significant.

Suffice to say, I don’t plan on looking for other work any time soon.

Press release: Symantec selects US-Analytics to provide national consulting services and solutions

DALLAS, May 19, 2010 — Professional services firm US-Analytics, headquartered in Dallas Texas, recently announced the expansion of the US-Analytics Partner Alliance Program to shore up the explosive demand for consulting services related to the security and availability software company, Symantec Corporation.

“The program has been so successful we have decided to expand the offering and scope greatly.” says Scott Preszler, CEO of US-Analytics.

US-Analytics attributes the growth to the decision by Symantec Corporation to vastly reduce, and in some instances terminate entirely, their consulting offerings in favor of utilizing the elite National SCP partner organization. US-Analytics is only one of a handful of SCP partners strictly focused on professional services to both direct clients and other Symantec partners.

“We now have a great opportunity to work closer with customers and partners,” said Preszler. “This trend of ‘lean’ involvement should do nothing but lower cost and improve overall client success and happiness with the Symantec community.”

US-Analytics remains impartial to ‘classic Symantec’ partners by solely providing services, versus selling hardware and software. The company has experienced success in this market, providing millions of dollars in revenue to Symantec Corporation and honing their skills with over 500 service engagements to Symantec clients.

“Any VAR organization that wants to join our Partner Alliance Program in essence gets to provide their clients with a vetted, certified and seasoned Symantec team who can augment the need for presales, implementation, delivery and support,” said Preszler. “We offer tremendous value with no additional cost to these organizations as a ‘virtual bench’ to our partners and their customers at a fraction of the cost it would take to build internally.”

More information about the US-Analytics Partner Alliance Program can be found on their website at http://www.us-analytics.com/symantec-services/partner-alliance or by contacting Paul Tatosian at (847) 890-5749.

ABOUT US-Analytics

As a leading consulting firm in full-service enterprise performance management and business intelligence solutions, US-Analytics helps companies unlock the power of their data.

Maintaining the highest levels of partnership with Oracle, Symantec, Microsoft and QlikView software companies, US-Analytics provides best-practice services around infrastructure, installation, custom applications and ongoing system administration.

US-Analytics’ proven solutions empower organizations to stop guessing and start harnessing data strategically to solve complex business problems and rise above competition. More information can be found at http://www.us-analytics.com

ABOUT Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

Microsoft Exchange can be easier and faster

By Jason S. Account Executive

Here are my Top 5 Tips to improve the performance and manageability of MS Exchange with Enterprise Vault:

1. Reduce Mailbox size

Enterprise Vault’s archiving and deduplication features reduce the overall size of an Exchange environment. Moving older items off Exchange and into Enterprise Vault can significantly trim message stores up to 90%, and dramatically speed up the migration process to Exchange 2010.

2. Eliminate User Mailbox Quotas

By archiving and using shortcuts, Enterprise Vault can eliminate the need for mailbox quotas and the need for PSTs without taking away that familiar user experience. A big headache for end users is consistently hitting their quota and having to delete or move email into PSTs.

3. Eliminate PSTs prior to 2010 rollout

By deploying Enterprise Vault, you can eliminate PST files by finding, collecting and centralizing them in the archive. When you deploy Exchange 2010 there will be no PST’s to collect, corrupt or manage. Legacy PST data will still be accessible to end users via the original folder structure and Outlook search.

4. Optimize Exchange Hardware Usage

You can manage the size of mailboxes and Exchange archives with Enterprise Vault by implementing retention and expiry policies as they deploy. This will cut down the number of servers and storage required for your new Exchange deployment and keep Exchange growth at predictable levels.

5. Create a faster searchable archive

Enable end users to search across live and archived email with native Microsoft Outlook or Windows desktop search tools while giving legal teams the tools to search, discover, review and implement legal holds with no IT dependencies.