Arctera Enterprise Vault is a file archiving option.
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Barracuda Message Archiver
Score 7.3 out of 10
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The Barracuda Message Archiver is designed to help organizations reduce email storage requirements, meet demanding compliance requirements, and address e-discovery requests easily and effectively. Integration with the Barracuda Cloud provides long-term email storage and backup.
It is not linked to a specific hardware component and can be installed on any platform. It is a perfect solution for basically all companies and the user experience is simple and easy to use. Another positive point is that it has become the best solution for archiving emails and secret documents. The points of attention revolve around the cost for companies with many users. If there is no planning, it can become a major cost.
For every company which is too big for MailStore. MailStore is much cheaper and easier...so mostly enough for 5 to 20 people companies. But for all bigger companies with 200 plus users it is the right solution. Please be sure, that it is not easy to get it running. But when it runs, it is mostly stable.
EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web.
EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage.
EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface.
We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports.
Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
The product is good but for this specific product there are often some technical problems. Mostly support in Vienna can solve them soon. The development is very, very slow. I have asked for some changes. They gave the okay to make it with a feature request...but 3 years later there is still no code for my problems. Not even one feature request was done.
The support in Vienna is very, very great. They are fast and can support almost all problems by themselves. Especially Mr. Michael Holzer is a very high specialist and you can ask him almost everything. Just write a mail to emeasupport and you will be sure, that some minutes or hours later you will get a kind and professional call.
Think about using offline archives. They make a lot of trouble. Better train your users to use the Outlook Addin Search without using offline archives, which need a lot of power, network and harddrive space. Headers only functionality was promised years ago but is still not implemented.
Using Enterprise Vault means having a system that is not directly integrated in your backups, and not tied to the upgrade kadence of your backup systems is nice. With CommVault or other backup driven software the upgrade cycle and user experience is not always tied to the desktop products so users can be left using older versions. In addition, CommVault and other backup based software often does not have good litigation hold and search tools.
For us it is important that it is stable. Because of this we thought it is a good idea to buy a clustered station. Barracuda can do this and we bought 2 1050 boxes and linked them. At the end the price was also okay...we also evaluated Symantec and at the end both were candidates but Barracuda made better price.