Published by: ZL Tech
Customers of ZL Technologies Show How to Avoid Pitfalls Encountered With Enterprise Vault Deployments While Reducing Costs and Raising Performance
SAN JOSE, CA – Dec. 13, 2011 Symantec Corporation has released its latest version 10 “upgrade” of its Enterprise Vault archiving software, which includes an overdue replacement of its old third-party Alta Vista search engine with a new search engine from yet another third-party vendor. While Symantec marketing focuses on the advantages of its latest version, Enterprise Vault users need to carefully evaluate the ramifications of the changes and compare the total costs of an Enterprise Vault software upgrade against the advantages of replacing it with a more robust, longer term solution.
“Symantec’s ‘upgrade’ is really just replacing one troublesome, third-party component with another leaving customers stuck between a rock and hard place,” said Kon Leong, CEO and Founder of ZL Technologies, a leader in archiving for large enterprises.
Alternatively, the user can keep the old Enterprise Vault data as-is and let the new search engine index all the new data. However, this approach may cause even more difficulties since there are now two search engines with entirely different capabilities searching two separate data archives. Consequently, inconsistent results from identical search commands could cause serious problems with legal defensibility and de-duplication.
Even after all the pain of upgrading Enterprise Vault, the user is still exposed to the same risks. As Leong puts it: “What happens if Symantec is forced to switch 3rd party vendors again further down the road? Which user wants to go through all that pain all over again?”
The Enterprise Vault user now faces a decision on whether to upgrade the software. The user must evaluate the significant costs of keeping Enterprise Vault, especially considering future vendor lock-in to a limited solution. However, this decision point also represents an opportune time to examine the benefits of replacing Enterprise Vault with a long-term solution.
Such a long-term solution should provide future-proofing with three key characteristics. First, a unified platform sweeps away today’s inefficient silos to offer one system, one data copy and one control point for retention policy for all archiving applications, including eDiscovery, records management, compliance and storage management. Second, it must offer extreme scalability to handle the combined data volumes. Third, all program code must be under in-house control, which effectively excludes third party components.
Combining these three characteristics, ZL’s Unified Archive provides long-term archiving solutions for large enterprises. Its typical customers rank in the Fortune 500, with on-premise or cloud implementations managing billions of documents in a unified repository. Many have replaced broken archives, including Enterprise Vault. Total costs of ownership are typically reduced by half or more, while search speed is increased by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. Most importantly, ZL has 100% control of its important source code, which avoids painful Enterprise Vault-type “upgrades” involving the swapping out of third-party components.
Along with superior performance and lower costs, Leong adds that “ZL can also offer Enterprise Vault users a super-fast migration of Enterprise Vault data into Unified Archive at very competitive rates, so that users can begin to rest easy on protecting the long-term value of their archive investment.”
To learn more about how switching to ZL Technologies’ Unified Archive platform can eliminate the pain of upgrading to Enterprise Vault 10.0 and provide a future-proof e-mail and document archiving solution, visit www.truthinarchiving.com or call 1-408-240-8989.