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Discovery Accelerator

Catalog: Today’s Card Catalog for Your Enterprise Vault Data

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Introducing the Catalogue 

Imagine walking into an enormous library looking for a book on a particular subject, maybe even a specific book. Where do you start? There are floors upon floors of shelves filled with more books than you can fathom, so you don’t want to wander around aimlessly. You’d be lost for days! Instead, you go to the card catalog – most likely online. The catalogue doesn’t have the content of each book, but rather the metadata of the books to help you find just the one(s) you’re looking for, including the title, publication info, subject, location, etc.  

As the amount of unstructured data continues to grow at an incredible rate, the ability to find data in vast repositories such as Veritas Enterprise Vault becomes more challenging.  IDG believes unstructured data is growing at the rate of 62% per year, and that by 2022, 93% of all data will be unstructured.* At Vault Solutions, we have been building products for over a decade that help deal with this data, and recently we’ve release an important new innovation.  

Our team has developed a new feature in our flagship Archive Accelerator product which allows organizations to do certain searches in seconds instead of minutes.  We call it the Catalog.  Using the Catalog, we can do a query across an entire Enterprise Vault environment which would normally have taken hundreds of searches using the built in Enterprise Vault search engine.  This is not a replacement for Enterprise Vault Search, but a way to take the strain off the Enterprise Vault indexes for certain classes of inquiries, such as finding all messages sent to/from an individual (custodian).  

Examples of queries that can be done with the catalog: 

  • Find all emails sent from anyone to a particular vendor 
  • Find all emails sent to/from an individual (e.g. custodian) 
  • Find all emails sent to/from a department 
  • Find all emails sent between two dates to/from an individual
  • Find all files archived from a particular location 

Scalability 

This Catalog is designed to handle billions of emails and can itemize all messages even in environments with multiple Enterprise Vault servers.   

Currently, the Catalog has been incorporated in our Archive Accelerator Enterprise Search application and is automatically used in many searches that can be accomplished without a full text index. Doing so makes some of the searches go over 10 times faster than before. 

We’ve also tested using the Catalog to place legal holds on data in Enterprise Vault and have shown we can do this more than 50 times faster than using Discovery Accelerator.  Of course, Discovery Accelerator should still be used when the legal holds involve searching the content of messages.  

While the Catalog is an enormous benefit for many applications, it is not a replacement for the indispensable Enterprise Vault indexes, or for Discovery Accelerator.  It doesn’t index the contents of messages or attachments, for example, only the metadata. 

Comparing Enterprise Vault indexes with the Catalog 

When searching Enterprise Vault, there are hundreds of indexes to search through, filled with both email content AND metadata. Part of the speed and efficiency of the Catalog is that there is only one.

Final Catalogue vs EV Indexes Table

So, for any organizations needing a way to quickly search through terabytes of email archived with Enterprise Vault, or a dramatically more efficient way to routinely put email on legal hold for given custodians, the Catalog can provide be a huge advantage.

* Source: darkreading.com

Custodian Manager Tools: Un-Complicating Data Imports to Discovery Accelerator

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Custodian Manager Tools

Organizations using Veritas Enterprise Vault™ Discovery Accelerator might need to import, synchronize, and map large numbers of custodians into their Discovery Accelerator environment. For them, Vault Solutions’ Archive Accelerator Custodian Manager Tools may be just what they’re looking for to ensure a smooth process. Whether it’s completing a discovery or putting documents on legal hold, many companies need to be able to quickly and precisely retrieve data related to a topic or particular user at any given moment. This means that archived data needs to be organized, on point, and discoverable in its environment – even when that environment becomes complicated due to the process of data importing.

Archive Accelerator Custodian Manager Tools is an application designed to import CSV and XML files containing user account information, aliases, and email addresses using predefined business logic. Imported records are either merged with existing custodian profiles or new profiles are created in the Veritas Custodian Manager database safely and accurately.

Archive Accelerator Custodian Manager Tools Staging View
“Initiating a Manual Import of a Staged Custodian in Custodian Manager Tools”

 

Companies are able to utilize a traditional mechanism to import custodian data to Discovery Accelerator. This is commonly done by synchronizing with Active Directory and IBM® Lotus Notes® and Domino® data. This presents a challenge when there are custodians from other systems that need to be in the new Discovery Accelerator environment: former employees, users that were part of an old email system, and most frequently, data sets of newly acquired or merged companies. In this last scenario, addresses often do not match and need to be mapped to existing addresses to prevent the creation of duplicate data.

Custodian Manager is also flexible enough to work just as well with small environments as it does with enormous ones. Just recently, we imported and merged 136,000 custodian records all at one time – first attempt, with no duplicates. This type of performance provides for fewer business interruptions as user records are transitioned efficiently and effectively.

Choosing a method that is efficient and reliable when importing large amounts of custodian data into the Discovery Accelerator environment is critical to business continuity. To learn more about how Vault Solutions Archive Accelerator Custodian Manager Tools may be the perfect solution to your data mapping challenges, contact us today. We’re always happy to help you find the right solution for your data needs.

Veritas and the Veritas Logo, and Enterprise Vault are trademarks or registered trademarks of Veritas Technologies LLC or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
IBM, Lotus Notes, and Domino are registered trademarks of International Business Machine Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

Into the Vault: Archive Accelerator Import

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Archive Accelerator Import

When companies need to import data into Enterprise Vault, at times it requires additional tools to get the job done. Thankfully, Veritas Enterprise Vault has arguably the most extensive API of any major archiving solution.

Initially, Vault Solutions LLC developed the Archive Accelerator Import feature for AVST™ Voicemail Archiving. It was developed with a plug-in architecture, making it easy to snap-in importers for any type of data format a customer might have – without the wait for a new version of Archive Accelerator to be released.

Typically, there are reasons that companies would need to use more than the standard tools: if they’re updating their systems, importing legacy EML or MSG files into Enterprise Vault, or if they are going through a merger or acquisition. In the latter situation, data needs to be moved from one system to the other and the two sets of archived data need to live together under the new organization.

When it comes to legacy data, there are usually other factors at play like file organization and the age of the data. Often the organizations that use Archive Accelerator Import are large. We recently completed a project for a multinational bank,  bringing 40 TB of legacy data into Enterprise Vault.

Archive Accelerator Import can be used to immediately import data from a data source or it can import data on a schedule. It keeps chain of custody information about all items imported and also keeps track of what has been imported to ensure against re-importing the same data. It can be set to automatically delete imported data after a defined period of time.

Archive Accelerator Import has grown over time from supporting AVSTTM Voicemail Archiving to importing many sources of data including EML, MSG, Discovery Accelerator, and others. While no migration is too small, the speed and efficiency with which AA Import completes significantly sized jobs makes it the ideal companion for large companies in need of moving critical data securely.

 

TRADEMARKS. AVST and/or other AVST products referenced herein are either registered trademarks or trademarks of AVST Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

The New Advantages of Export: Targeted Export and Enhanced Speed

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The New Advantages of Export

By David Ouellette

When I was product manager for Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator (CA) and Discovery Accelerator (DA) about 10 years ago, I worked with many large financial institutions that used those products in earnest (and of course, many still do).  They are both quite comprehensive products, and their many features are there due to customer demand.  Discovery Accelerator is typically used to respond to eDiscovery requests including criteria such as all messages with certain keywords, sent to or from a defined list of ‘custodians’, and/or over a particular date range.  DA has the flexibility to create a Case, create searches to put items into the Case, perform reviews of those items, and export relevant ‘responsive’ messages.

Discovery Accelerator does that task admirably, but several of our largest customers would ask me for an efficient way to export data with less administrative overhead, and with an emphasis on performance.  There were situations where they didn’t need the eDiscovery aspects of the product, but just needed a quick way to get a fair amount of data out of the system. They wanted a way to just export all data for a number of custodians for the last 6 months, for example.  The IT department would get a lot of requests like that, and though it can be done with DA, it takes more administrative work and time than it needs to.  We built our Archive Accelerator Export as a way to respond to the simple non eDiscovery requests.  In fact, Vault Solutions was commissioned by Symantec to create Archive Accelerator Export for a large customer that had 10’s of Terabytes of data to export, a task for which DA was not designed.  We’ve since sold it to many companies worldwide that had a simple need to export a lot of data from EV in as short a time as possible.

We built Archive Accelerator Export (AAE) to give companies the ability to conduct fast, highly robust mass exports of data from Enterprise Vault. Information can be exported for third-party analysis, taken offline for long-term storage, preserved in a non-proprietary format, or migrated to a separate archive for any number of reasons.

This past summer, we released the latest version of Archive Accelerator Export with several new features aimed at significantly improving functionality. We’re particularly excited about Targeted Export and its ability to be flexible with the data that’s being exported, especially in larger organizations.  Typically, the journal archive is a mix of everyone’s data, not organized or separated by any folder structure. It’s great when used for eDiscovery or compliance exercises, but doesn’t allow for granular data exports. Targeted Export allows for the efficient export of a particular user’s email from the journal archives, enabling you to target specific emails by person and date range rather than having to export the entire archive. In addition, large companies with more than one brand under their umbrella, or those that have changed names, can also search and export based on domain.

Although flexibility is a welcomed improvement, another crowd pleaser is speed. We optimized AAE’s performance by increasing speed with a new 64 bit architecture (see graphs). Whether exporting .MSG or .PST files, Archive Accelerator Export exports more gigabytes per hour than Discovery Accelerator.

 .pst files - gigabytes per hour
.msg files - gigabytes per hour

Worth noting in these visuals is the type of file, and the difference in export speed. In the same amount of time, AAE can export 32.7 GB of data in .MSG, and only 14.6 GB in .PST format. .MSG, which exports the data in individual messages, is 2x faster with Archive Accelerator Export than Discovery Accelerator, and nearly 3x faster than exporting in .PST, making it the preferred file type when possible.

It is sometimes impossible to avoid exporting .PST files, but when that’s the case, it’s important to note that in both formats, Archive Accelerator Export transfers at least 2x the data per hour than Discovery Accelerator.  Of course, all this being said, AAE is no replacement for DA when there is a need to perform other eDiscovery tasks such as keyword searching and document review and marking.

Read more to learn how Vault Solutions’ Archive Accelerator Export can help target the data you need to export.