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Symantec Enterprise Vault, Hardware needed and reviews of software

We are looking at purchasing symantec enterprise vault. I am wondering for a mid size company 1000 emails a day company wide, what kind of hardware to use. Put this software on a separate server then exchange and have some monster drives or use NAS. I am guessing you must need SQL backend for this product. I tried calling symantec and could get through to anyone. Anyone use this product? Opinions?

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lnkevin

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mkurtzhals

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Is sql used for this product then?? Since we are a smaller company, I am leaning towards single server with large HDs

Member_2_231077

SQL is used but not heavily, it tells the software which servers have indexes, data and whatever on them. You could get away with MSDE in the past although it wasn't supported, SQL express 2005 is now supported and that's free.

za_mkh

Remember that MSDE (Sql 2000), Sql Express (2005) has database limits of 2GB and 4Gb respectively. This could affect you in the long run as it depends on the sizes of the emails that you archive. We are also busy looking at the Symantec Enterprise Vault - seems to be ok so far ...

mkurtzhals

ASKER

Funny thing is I am trying to setup a conf call with our reseller and the symantec territory rep keeps blowing us off. Would I be able to get away with Sata drives?

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Archived emails and their index aren't stored using SQL za_mkh, the mails are files and index is AltaVista unless they changed it in 2007.

SATA is fine for the email archive but indexes should to be on SAS or SCSI. Email compresses about 50% if you're lucky and full index is (or was in ver 7) 12% of that. Best thing to do is get a controller that supports mixed SAS and SATA. Indexes would burn out 20% duty-cycle SATA disks.

za_mkh

Thanks Andy, wasn't aware of that. Like I said we busy looking at it too.