Forum Discussion

jerrys79's avatar
jerrys79
Level 4
11 years ago

Does anyone actually use EV.cloud or just the on premise EV?

I am researching an email archiving system for my company.  Our reseller recommends EV.  I agree that EV is a great enterprise level product but feel it might be too high end for our medium sized company.  I am hesitant to deploy it due to the complexity as well as the high system requirements.  We would end up with more EV servers than we have Exchange servers, which just seems crazy to me.  We only have 2 on premise Exchange servers with less than 400 mailboxes and our total amount of email including journaled archives is around 12 TB.

With that being said, I am interested in EV.cloud especially since it says no required hardware, software or client plug-ins are needed.  However, in checking, there is very little information on EV.cloud.  There have only been 29 threads created in a 2 year period with one of them asking how to move away from it.  The consulting companies don't seem to have the experience or knowledge that they have with the on premise version.  Is the product any good?  I know Symantec's marketing makes it out to be a great product but would really like to hear of real world customer experience.  Thank you.

Enterprise Vault.cloud
Information Governance
Review
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • AndrewB's avatar
    AndrewB
    11 years ago

    my 0.02$ here... first of all, sounds like you need to be working with a partner that knows the solutions they're selling to you.

    second, you can't base EV.cloud's success off of the support forums. it's a cloud service and hardly requires anything from you in terms of support - really. once its setup, which can be in a few short hours, that's pretty much it.

    we have many customers on both solutions. some net new to both, some went from EV to EV.cloud. i'd be happy to help fill any gaps or answer any questions if you want to drop me a PM.

  • AndrewB's avatar
    AndrewB
    11 years ago

    for what its worth... Office365 has been down, Netflix has been down, AWS has been down, PS3 network has been down. the list goes on. "the cloud" is not some magical unicorn. it's just in someone else's data center.

    to be clear in this case, however, data still flowed in and out, it was just user access that was impacted. Symantec has stepped up and is crediting 3x$ back to the affected customers for the outage. I think that's the true sign of a company you want to do business with.

    customers and partners were notified with the outage details you're asking about. if you're not a .Cloud customer, you wouldn't get a memo. i dont know if its on the public website yet but your Symantec partner should have this information. again, if you're not satisfied with the value you're getting from your partner, drop me a PM and maybe my company can help.

  • TonySterling's avatar
    TonySterling
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Out of curiosity, how many EV servers are being recommended?  If you only have 400 mailboxes I would assume that would just be one EV Server for you.  Maybe a second if you want Discovery Accelerator.
     

  • AndrewB's avatar
    AndrewB
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    my 0.02$ here... first of all, sounds like you need to be working with a partner that knows the solutions they're selling to you.

    second, you can't base EV.cloud's success off of the support forums. it's a cloud service and hardly requires anything from you in terms of support - really. once its setup, which can be in a few short hours, that's pretty much it.

    we have many customers on both solutions. some net new to both, some went from EV to EV.cloud. i'd be happy to help fill any gaps or answer any questions if you want to drop me a PM.

  • jerrys79's avatar
    jerrys79
    Level 4
    11 years ago

    Tony, I guess I should be more clear.  I haven't actually received a hardware quote as they appear to be struggling to put one together.  Our discussions over the phone indicate there are 4 enterprise components required.  An EV server, some type of fast storage (DAS, SAN) for the indexes, 2nd piece of slower storage for the archive itself, flat files, digital vault shares, SIS, etc.. and then a SQL server for 3 DB's, directory DB for tasks, policies, scheduling, provisioning; a fingerprint DB to hold the hash comparisons; a vault store DB.  We currently don't have any of this hardware so it's all new purchases.  I'm not sure if the EV server with the storage can just be a 1U server with some type of disk enclosure attached to it and a mix of fast/slow drives with room to grow.  Also not sure if SQL can run on the EV server and not require a separate box.  Not to mention we need a backup solution for it.  The whole project, especially the hardware design stage, is making my head spin and the amount of documentation is overwhelming.

    AndrewB, I agree with you on not basing EV.cloud's success on the support forums.  Unfortunately, I have nothing to go by, no reviews, no customer testimonials, no customer contacts, so that's why I posed the question here in hopes I could get some real world feedback.  EV.cloud is a lot harder to research if you're not a partner/reseller.  It's even difficult to find any documentation.  It appears Symantec makes you go through a reseller which is fine but I only want to do so after knowing something about the product.  Since i've originally posted my thread yesterday, I found a few bits of information. One positive being the few customer success stories posted on symantec.com but the big find is the 3-4 day outage of EV.cloud at the end of October. It scares me that I can't find any comments from Symantec, who is a major vendor, discussing a root cause analysis as well as what they plan to do to prevent a future outage.  Just yesterday I was open to the idea of putting a business critical function in EV.cloud but now i'm not so sure I want to go down that road.

    Thank you both for responding. 

  • AndrewB's avatar
    AndrewB
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    for what its worth... Office365 has been down, Netflix has been down, AWS has been down, PS3 network has been down. the list goes on. "the cloud" is not some magical unicorn. it's just in someone else's data center.

    to be clear in this case, however, data still flowed in and out, it was just user access that was impacted. Symantec has stepped up and is crediting 3x$ back to the affected customers for the outage. I think that's the true sign of a company you want to do business with.

    customers and partners were notified with the outage details you're asking about. if you're not a .Cloud customer, you wouldn't get a memo. i dont know if its on the public website yet but your Symantec partner should have this information. again, if you're not satisfied with the value you're getting from your partner, drop me a PM and maybe my company can help.

  • Sacju's avatar
    Sacju
    Level 2
    11 years ago

    Jerrys79,

          I've had a lot of "real world" experience on this so thought I'd chime in.   We are a state data center that has hosted the EV on-premise solution for another state Dept. customer. Earlier this year they migrated to the Cloud solution after having been used the on-preise for 3+ years. A 3rd party was subcontracted by symantec to migrate the data via PST format to the cloud. It went fairly well. I mention this in case you go for on-premise solution and may consider migrating to cloud later.

    We have a very large environment. 80,000 plus mailboxes and 7 sets (4 servers per DAG) of Exchange 2010 DAG servers. However, that includes all our customer mailboxes that we host. For the customer subscribed to the cloud solution it's ~37,000 of those mailboxes. They are our largest customer.

    There are 2 components I setup overall and it went fairly smooth.

    1. Sync AD objects to the cloud so that Archives are auto-Provisioned.
    2.  Enable journaling of users and point to the cloud smpt address.

    To make the connection to the cloud from our Active Directory to allow for auto-provision of archives I did this.

    1.  Stood up 1 Cloud Link virtual server.
    2.  Selected only the OU for that customer to sync to the cloud.

    I have had no issues with the Cloudlink App itself and the sync's. They did have a 4 day outage a few weeks ago which of course broke the sync. But it sync's up all changes since last successful sync.

    For the journaling part I did this.

    1. created a contact in exchange using the smtp address of the cloud.
    2. set a journal rule on all the databases (for that customer) and pointed to the contact.
    3. I setup separate gateway servers just for the cloud traffic. I wanted to separate it from our other gateway that handles"normal" email traffic outbound. This was a safety net because symantec recommended that we have enought storage on the gateway server to hold 7 days worth of traffice in case the cloud service went down. I thought wow, they might be down for 7 days? Well, they were down for 4 days a few weeks ago. However, they were accepting email traffic and holding it until the problem was resolved so it didn't impact my gateway.

    As far as the search tool (eDiscovery) on the website, I cannot speak to that. I have no view of it as my customer is the one using it and also legal ramification around that. Also, that 4 day outage in October did have a major impact as eDiscovery was not available to our legal team. I hear there was a lot of backlash from customers on it and understandably so.

    They also wanted to make use of Folder sync. This sync's the users Outlook folders to their personal archive in the cloud and they see the same folder structure as if in Outlook. If exchange is down, they can still see their folders and emails since last sync. I did have 2 setup 2 separate servers for this. 1 for the folder sync app and 1 for SQL. It was highly recommended to have separate SQL server. We had a lot of issues early on with folder sync but to be fair we are a highly complicated environment and most issues have been resolved with the new releases since. We have not rolled this out to all users yet but are still piloting this for now.

    Well, I could go on and on but hopefully you will find this helpful. I guess you could say I've spent some time supporting this. :-D

     

     

     

     

  • jerrys79's avatar
    jerrys79
    Level 4
    11 years ago

    Sacju,

    That was a very helpful reply.  I appreciate the time you took to write all that out in detail.  We are definitely going with EV for our archiving solution but the cloud vs on-premise situation hasn't yet been decided. 

    Thanks again.

     

  • Sacju's avatar
    Sacju
    Level 2
    11 years ago

    I supported the on-premise for 3 years. We were on version 9.3. moved to cloud so never got on vs. 10. The journaling of 37,000 users went fairly flawless. I used the search tool a few times but my customer used it relentlessly and it was pretty stable. The search engine however was not that great (32-bit) so it was pretty slow. If I recall right, vs.10 went 64-bit and had a new search engine and was suppose to be much faster.