Archiving Truth
The world of archiving would be a much happier place if vendors told their customers the whole truth when talking about their solutions. What follows are conversations drawn from real world situations that tell the story behind what archiving vendors say.
Customer Asks:
"It looks like my legal department wants to archive email and retrieve it using a retention policy of five years. In fact, the rest of my company is more than doubling in size each year. We’ve already acquired some smaller companies and may acquire even more. My email and file volume could easily explode overnight. I need to be ready with a solution that will stand up to that kind of jump in volume. Does your solution support that kind of scalability and functionality?"
Vendor Says:
"Of course. BigCo is one of the largest most well-regarded software firms in the world. We have been doing retention since the very beginning with some of the biggest customers in the world. Our solution can set retention policies for as long as you like and grow as much as you need..."
Vendor Doesn't Say:
"... but usually before the retention period is up most of our customers have already found a replacement solution because even though you can store email for as long as you want in BigCo's Archiving Solution, FINDING that email for legal or compliance purposes usually takes a very long time, usually hours if it doesn't time out first, even for one email.
Many times the search engine just stops working because the index corrupts, which is a much bigger problem that we never talk about. Index corruption means that you have to re-ingest all the email from that index in order to get your search engine back on track. Re-ingestion typically takes weeks, usually months. Until then your search engine is pretty much dead in the water and your legal team won't be able to do searches until it's back up and running.
Even if we had a chance to scale, scaling would mean deploying duplicate archives each with its own infrastructure and administration for every few million mails. Multiple servers for each, and none of the redundant archives would be able to share resources or balance load across themselves."
ZL Says:
ZL searches typically take seconds to complete, not hours or days. With proximity searching and stopword indexing, ZL users can pinpoint their searches much more quickly than competing users.ZL's indexes are self-healing and are able to recover from corruption in the matter of an hour or two, instead of weeks if they happen at all. ZL’s architecture is designed to minimize downtime and maximize performance.
ZL is a GRID, so it scales simply by the addition of off-the-shelf servers without requiring redundant deployments or wasting resources. In general, ZL deployments require roughly one-third or one-fourth of the resources required by other vendors.
Learn the Truth About Archiving:
 |
 |
 |
||