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grlandge
Not applicable
Enterprise Vault is scalable and affordable place for information which cannot be categorised as structured information like your RDBMS database. The example of unstructured information included -
 File Server
  •  Mail Server
  • Share Point etc.
EV gives a wide choice of implementation scenarios for saving cost on storage and retention of information which is required for compliance purpose.

EV is best suited for requirements of
  •  Storage reduction
  • Retention of electronic data for compliance purpose
  • Server consolidation
  • Knowledge Sharing repository
  • Reduce backup Window due to increase in the data size
The architecture of EV consist of

1) Storage devices (NAS/SAN/Optical Device/Tape device)

2) Policies, Indexing task, Search capabilities, Compression, security on the stored information

3) Application in use i.e. Exchange/Lotus Domino, SharePoint, File server etc

4) Last and outer most layer which included the retrieval of data via MS Outlook/Lotus Notes, Web Browser. This layer is used by end users.

This provides the flexible way to archive the information. A single instance can support multiple applications i.e. the same can be used for Lotus Domino as well as File sharing application. The EV is recommended to be installed on dedicated machine. All these applications are accessed via local area network.

In the beginning, I wrote about scalability. When we talk about scalability, it means the EV system can be increased incremental as the customer setup increase. This is achieved because EV has component based design. For  e.g.

1) Agents that are responsible for fetching the information from the application such as Exchange, File Servers, Instant messaging, SharePoint etc.

2) The storage service that stores data from the application

3) The Indexing service

4) The restoration service responsible for restores

5) Web Server based functionality that delivers search, read and other functionality to end users and to calling applications.


All these components can be installed on single of few machines initially and as the load increased or customer infrastructure increased, we can separate them on different servers making the EV truly scalable.

Component architecture

You can configure either archiving on a schedule or archiving in real time or a combination of these two methods. While designing the architecture, one has to consider the number of items being archived from the target system. This generally requires more processing power. So if the processing power is insufficient, one can add multiple CPUs to a server. EV supports up to 32-way servers. You can also increase the number of servers doing a specific task for e.g. indexing or retrieving etc.

The other factor which you need to consider for scalability is storage system. For better through put the archives be configured on different devices. As the archives increased the backup window also increases. To overcome this situation, you can further partition the vault store.

Indexing is the integral part of EV. This gets installed with each vault. Indexing is a configurable parameter in EV and one can choose from attributes, full word and/or phrase based index.

As the Vaults increases in size, one can manage all of them from a single location using Microsoft Management console. The EV is totally storage vendor independent and any storage device which supports NTFS file system can be used. The items in EV are stored in compressed mode and only a single copy (instance) is stored on the server for a particular item. Like storage vendor independence, EV is also backup vendor independent. You can use your excising backup solution to additionally integrate with EV.

Since we are moving the data from item to EV, this data should be written to EV in such a way that it does not get lost in the transit. For this transaction logging system is used to copy the data. Once the data is written to storage on EV, then it is deleted from the Exchange or File server or any other system.

Since the data for every user is stored on the EV, one has to authenticate to access the Data. EV is integrated with active directory providing a single sign-on capability. For users who are not authenticated to active directory, they will be prompted with user name and password to access the information intended for them.

Access to this information by enterprise  (not by end-user access) to the archived information held in Enterprise Vault typically requires Scalability and auditability. The Business Accelerators of Enterprise Vault (Discovery and Compliance Accelerators) provide the tools to perform message supervision, regulatory search and discovery across the entire Enterprise Vault. All of the accelerators are based on 3 major functions

Search: As all information held in Enterprise Vault is indexed then all information can be recalled in a very fast manner. Searches for information that took weeks when looking at backups can take minutes using Enterprise Vault

Workflow: Unlike the user search, corporate searches can take many people many days to complete. Usually a review process is part of the search and this will see many people with different security rights take part in this search. The business accelerators help minimize the cost of these searches by ensuring that the whole search is wrapped up in a workflow process along with the whole review process.

Audit: Many regulatory bodies insist that the whole process is audited so that they can be assured as to the actions that were taken by these people involved in the process.

All of the Business Accelerators extend the simple user searches by storing the searches for possible reuse and recording all of the relevant audit data in SQL server. Mechanisms are also available for the external production of the items relevant to the discovery case under investigation.

Storage and indexing goes hand in hand. Once the data is queued for storage, indexing process for that data is started. It indexes based on attributes defined for indexing. If any file to be indexed specially in Exchange/Domino Mail, it is converted to text format by built in "Stellant" Technology.

Archived information can be accessed either by clicking the stub left after archival in mail or on file share. Alternatively the information can be searched using the associated search application.

To summarise, EV is a stand-alone but scalable system. It integrates with MS Exchange/File server/Share point/IM and provides Storing, Indexing, Searching, and Retrieving using a rich set of clients.

So EV is a great application which allows you to "Stop buying Storage"
Comments
PJuster
Level 5
Employee Accredited
I disagree slightly with comment "So EV is a great application which allows you to "Stop buying Storage""

EV reduces the need to buy storage attached to your Tier one services (EMail/Sharepoint/File Servers) by allowing an administrator to archive (migrate) data from these platforms to storage connected to the EV server.  The idea being is that data in EV is a Tier two application could potentially be on slower cheaper storage as the archived (older) data is less likely to be accessed.

Additionally EV also allows data to be migrated off of the storage connected to the EV server by "migrating" it to tape using NetBackup for example. Thus creating another tier of storage where data is still retained, but on an even slower medium but can still be recalled, albeit it slower.

EV allows data being archived to have policies applied to it, that specify how long the data is retained for, so a company/administrator can implement some data life cycle principles to there environment. I.E Mail is held for seven years for Accounts Staff and Directors, but general office users data is retained for three years.  EV will keep track of this data and remove it when the retetion period has expired.

It should also be noted that EV is not a backup solution and requires backing like any other application.

HTH
chhabrak
Not applicable
Good
Version history
Last update:
‎09-29-2009 10:17 AM
Updated by: