Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

November 6, 2007 - Companies of all sizes are often involved in some type of litigation — unfortunately, it's an unpleasant aspect of doing business, and one that requires companies to be prepared to defend themselves both from the lawsuit and from the often more disruptive legal discovery process. In the age of email, this means being able to find and recall structured and unstructured data for many years. Civil rules of procedure set specified times to retrieve data from emails, instant messages, files, and any other content to use in legal cases, a process known as e-discovery. Unfortunately, most archives are stored on backup tapes, requiring full volume restores and a manual search of the context of every piece of communication. It's like searching for a needle in a haystack. With Symantec Enterprise Vault running on a Sun platform, you can reduce the e-discovery process from 2-5 weeks down to a matter of hours — and more efficiently and cost-effectively manage and protect your data over time.

Sun and Symantec

For 25 years, Symantec has been enabling people to have confidence in their infrastructures, their information, and their interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Sun and Symantec have worked together for years, continuously strengthening their alliance to deliver industry leading, innovative data protection solutions. For the last 18 months, Sun has worked closely with Symantec to optimize, test, and certify Symantec Enterprise Vault with Sun StorageTek products. Lauded by Gartner as the clear leader for the last four years in email active archiving*, it provides a cost-effective, efficient solution to support e-discovery and long-term managed archives, especially when paired with Sun storage systems and software.

Symantec Enterprise Vault

Symantec Enterprise Vault provides a software-based intelligent archiving platform that stores, manages, and enables discovery of corporate data from email systems, file servers, instant messaging platforms, and content management and collaboration systems. Enterprise Vault uses intelligent classification engines to manage different types of data, improving the ability to retain and protect corporate information from a large variety of sources while reducing storage costs and simplifying management. Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator extends the basic search functionality of Enterprise Vault email and file archiving to help lower the cost of data collection and to facilitate the search and recovery of archived items in electronic discovery. Discovery Accelerator allows authorized reviewers (e.g., corporate litigation, HR, external counsel) to quickly target and pinpoint specific email and files as part of litigation support, legal discovery, or investigation.

Email Data Secure Archive Solution from Sun and Symantec

Sun and Symantec collaborated to create the Email Data Secure Archive Solution to enable organizations to establish policies for archiving, retaining, and recalling email data and attachments, whether on file servers or archive tape all while reducing risk and controlling costs. Organizations can combine Symantec Enterprise Vault content management software with Sun's easily pre-bundled or custom storage systems to create a comprehensive secure archive solution. The tiering capabilities of Sun storage enable near-term flexibility and associated economic benefits as well as longer term data protection transparency. Based on open standards, the solution creates an open storage pipeline where data, whether structured or unstructured, is managed in the same manner, thus enabling access to data today and years into the future.

The solution consists of a number of components that can be combined to handle secure archive in different ways:

• Cost-effective storage tiering is available with the Sun Customer Ready Content Infrastructure System (CIS) which offers an affordable way to manage massive amounts of data by seamlessly matching its value and frequency of access to the cost of the storage tier on which it resides. It also helps meet regulatory obligations and protects business assets at the same time. This centralized, user-accessible repository grows as data grows so you pay only for what you need.


• Sun StorageTek NAS Compliance Archiving System couples the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance with the Sun StorageTek Compliance Archiving Software to provide compliance-enabling features for authenticity, integrity, ready access, and security.


• Sun Storage Archive Manager (SAM-FS) eases the backup burden and enables companies to realize the cost savings of tiered storage. The software enables IT to reduce the cost of storing vast data repositories by providing a powerful, easily managed, cost-effective way to access, retain, and protect business data throughout its entire lifecycle. This self-protecting file system offers continuous backup and fast recovery features to help enhance productivity and improve resource utilization. Sun engineers enhanced and tuned SAM-FS to interface to Enterprise Vault through SAMBA, which is included in the Solaris Operating System (OS).


• Sun StorageTek QFS (QFS) shared file system software improves quality of service and utilization of SAN infrastructures. QFS enables IT to remotely and securely manage multiple SAM-FS servers, reducing management cost and complexity. With nearly raw device access to information and data consolidation for read/write file sharing, QFS helps to boost productivity and eliminate administrative overhead.


• The Sun StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station enables management of all encryption keys from a secure, centralized workstation. You can create, manage, and destroy software-based keys that absolutely allow or deny access to encrypted data.


• Sun StorageTek Tape Libraries and Modular Library Systems help you cost-effectively and securely manage and protect your data through the years with world-class tape libraries, tape virtualization, tape drives, tape media, and tape device software.

Symantec Enterprise Vault on the Sun Fire X4500 Server

Sun and Symantec continuously work together to best leverage Sun's innovative technology for Symantec solutions. Sun extends its reach into the Symantec team, forming a true partnership from product management and marketing, to sales and service. We work hand-in-hand to execute and promote optimized solutions that bring more value to our customers. says Steve Lowing, group product manager for Enterprise Vault partners, Symantec. In this case, the companies collaborated to optimize the Sun Fire X4500 server running Solaris 10 OS, Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager, and Solaris ZFS to deliver a high density, high capacity, high performance, low cost Network Attached Archival Storage system for Enterprise Vault. A configuration tool configures the combined server and storage system as Network Attached Archival Storage in a matter of minutes, providing appliance-like functionality for fast deployment. And the solution can easily be scaled by adding more servers.

Sun and Symantec it's the best of both worlds, enabling you to quickly find needles in haystacks and manage your enormous and constantly growing volume of data in a more economic and efficient manner.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops marketing communications for the technology industry.

* Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving, 2007