Hosted Enterprise Vault?

[RyanTheRed]

Hi -

I'm a veteran of a number of Enterprise Vault 6-8 implementations for companies but have run across a use case I have no experience with.

Basically we're looking at a hosted model, where a group of small medical / legal offices want to sign up for hosted archiving of files, not just email. Files will be CAD files (scares me), Xrays, etc, and are fairly large. Client organizations have varied WAN connections from DSL to Bonded T1 and in some cases more. These organizations typically don't use these files for more than 6 months but must keep them for 7 years and secure them.

Questions
1. Anyone with experience setting up Enterprise Vault as a "hosted" model in a central datacenter (quite apart from the technical constraints imposed by the WAN connection)
2. Are there providers who already have a hosted model
3. Anybody got some ideas on a hybrid approach... such as

- Small local EV installation
- Small local array with replication, or replicated with SFW/VVR to central DC
- Dynamic Storage Tiering across WAN (?)

This doesn't seem to be a use case Enterprise Vault serves easily, possibly due to the fact that archiving huge files across the WAN is just insane. But that's what I'm being asked for. I would be interested in how a solution like Iron Mountain's "virtual file system" offsite archiving solution might be built with Symantec products...

Ryan

[Maverik · Accepted solution]

I know of one company that does hosted solutions for customers.

The problems that I see is and this company in particular has not thought of is if the company wanted there data back after say three years of a contract.  Also they have massively had to increase WAN connectivity to allow archiving to run with any sort of degree of quality.

I dont know unfortunatly of anyone that has used dynamic storage across WAN and question how EV would cope with this.  EV just looks at the storage location for the files, if this could be done seamlessly and fool EV into thinking they were in the same place each time attempted acesss, whether this be on SAN or across WAN for example EV would not really care as long as it could get to the data fairly speedily. 

I think you may need to really involve Symantec in designing such an implementation to be honest.

[Wayne_Humphrey]

Ryan,

Questions
1. Anyone with experience setting up Enterprise Vault as a "hosted" model in a central data-center (quite apart from the technical constraints imposed by the WAN connection)
Yes, this has been done before, and yes I have done designs on something the same.
2. Are there providers who already have a hosted model
Yes, I know of two large US base hosting company's that offer just such a service.
3. Anybody got some ideas on a hybrid approach... such as

As Don says you will need to get Symantec Professional Services in to give you a hand or a Partner. You really do not want to plan this by yourself.

--wayne