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.
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
