Archiving software product specifications

Archive software provides many of the features we take for granted in modern archive systems, including index and search, data classification and migration, retention and deletion, litigation hold and even data reduction technologies, such as data deduplication. Security elements ensure that user access is tracked and logged and prevents unauthorized changes to the archived data. All these features must scale across archives that might span hundreds of terabytes. The product snapshots in this chapter highlight specifications for the following list of archiving software products that were selected based on input from industry analysts and SearchStorage.com editors. Specifications are current as of Decemeber 2007. Note: Although some of the products below overlap in features or capabilities with some of the email archiving products in chapter 1, the products in this chapter emphasize overall file archive capabilities. The following specifications have been provided by vendors and are periodically updated. Vendors are welcome to submit their updates and new product specifications to [email protected]. Go to the first product snapshot, or select the desired product below: Abrevity; FileData Software 3.0 AXS-One Inc.; AXS-Link for Lotus Notes Bycast Inc.; StorageGRID software CommVault; Data Archiver EMC Corp.; EmailXtender Archive Edition Hewlett-Packard Co.; Integrated Archive Platform IBM; Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Princeton Softech; IBM Optim Quest Software Inc.; Archive Manager Sherpa Software; Archive Attender Solix Technologies Inc.; Solix Enterprise Archiving Sun Microsystems Inc.; StorageTek Storage Archive Manager software Zantaz; Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) Return to the beginning Product Snapshot #1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Product: FileData Software 3.0 from Abrevity Data classification: FileData Classifier (FDC) can classify based on metadata attribute(s) or content including findings based on keywords or patterns found inside the files. FileData Manager (FDM) manages and controls remote FileData Classifiers to provide a single console for enterprise wide classification. Data migration: FDC provides a robust migration and movement engine that includes tiered storage, copy, move, archive, migration and deletion of data. Litigation hold: FDC can tag files for litigation hold and change the permissions of the file to restrict or remove access. FDC also integrates with many archive products and can set the legal hold flag on files inside the archive. Retention/deletion features: FDC integrates with archive solutions to set retention values and deletion or shredding options once the retention has been exceeded. FDC can delete data from both the archive and standard file system locations. Storage reduction features: FDC includes a user-tunable duplicate data discovery feature and also has the ability to identify and remove/archive stale and unwanted data to reduce storage utilization. Reporting and logging features: FDC has enterprise-class reporting with both text and graphical based abilities. FDM can consolidate reports from the FDCs to provide a single report across multiple locations. FDCs includes robust logging features that allow not only verbose logging but the logs to be queried and policies assigned to log parameters. Encryption and security features: Includes the ability to encrypt the FDC-to-FDM traffic and the ability to allow temporarily grant generic users the ability to set classification policies (but not actually have access to the data) by impersonating administrator privileges. Metadata features: Offers a verbose set of metadata management features. Via our included data modeling and database all metadata attributes can be queried and policies assigned to them. Everything in our classification database is metadata, including the tags, policies, and logs. Scalability: Since FDC and FDM work in hierarchy, there is potentially unlimited scalability. Currently a FDC node can manage up to 25 TB of data and a FDM can manage up to 50 FDC nodes, which would equate to over 1.2 PB of data managed from a single (FDM) console. Top five management features: Custom configuration; transactional file movement; file permissions/security modeling; discovery/search interface; distributed architecture. Archiving platform integration: FDC integrates with many archive platforms, including a custom integration with the Hitachi HCAP system. FDC also integrates with all optical and disk based archive systems. Hardware requirements: FDC/FDM: Intel- or AMD-based server running Windows 2003 Server or Windows XP, 2 GB+ RAM, two internal disks and Gigabit Ethernet (NAS). Multi-processors and additional RAM will increase performance and ability to manage more data on FDC nodes. Vendor comment: FDC and FDM are the only true scalable and distributed data classification products available. Availability: Currently available Base cost: First FDC node is $24,995 and includes 5 TB of data management. Each additional TB or FDC node is $3,000. Detailed specs: http://www.abrevity.com/solutions_content_driven_archiving/ Go to beginning ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Product Snapshot #2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Product: AXS-Link for Lotus Notes from AXS-One Inc. Data classification: User-defined classification rules can be used at the time of archival to automatically classify records for retention purposes. Common policies are based on a combination of named directory attributes, content and other key fields available within the message. In addition, mail messages are intercepted and, based on the policies defined within the MessageGate policy engine, the message will be marked with a category. Categorization can be based on message metadata, message body or contents of the message attachment. Data migration: Each category of data has a Retention Policy, a Process Map and a Storage Map associated with it. The storage map is used to integrate with customers' tiered storage model. This storage map can be configured to provide ILM capabilities; however, most customers integrate with their own implemented system such as TSM. The system is storage-agnostic and does not utilize a relational database; we write data serially to volumes on the file system based on date and category. Each category can be associated with different volumes which are hosted on different storage devices. When retention periods are long, the data can be migrated through the process all the way until the data is expired. Based on this information, we can integrate seamlessly with any type of storage environment and leverage any type of tiered storage or migration that the customer may want to implement. Litigation hold: All records in the archive associated with a specific legal matter can easily be placed on hold, ensuring their scheduled retention is suspended so they cannot be destroyed or modified in any way until the hold order is lifted. The AXS-One system allows documents already in the archive as well as new documents as they are archived to be put on hold automatically based on record categories or on keywords found within individual documents. A complete audit trail ensures a full history of all records managed by the system, from initial acquisition to final destruction, so electronic records contained in the AXS-One archive are of high evidential value in a court of law. Retention/deletion features: Organizations can manage the retention and disposition of emails and other records automatically according to corporate policies and regulations while automatically honoring active Litigation Holds. The workflow-enabled rules engine can easily be configured to meet specific policy requirements, including complex base date calculations and review of small samples of documents to audit the accuracy of the system. Rules can be defined to accommodate corporate information access policies. Retention Manager provides proactive and persistent monitoring of corporate records to ensure corporate policy adherence. Storage reduction features: The AXS-One solution will apply as many as eight levels of storage reduction prior to ingestion into the archive. Compression is performed after Single Instance Storage and deduplication has been performed. AXS-One uses a tunable and open compression which conservatively will reduce the storage requirement by 40% after realizing the storage advantages accomplished by implementing single instancing. Reporting and logging features: Pre-defined graphing/charting and reporting are used across various facets of the application interfaces. Reporting is available on audit and review functions within the system. Extracts can be defined to provide additional reporting across all elements maintained within the system. AXS-One supports data-extracts into various system technologies. Web-based viewing of system statistics is provided to deliver real-time monitoring capabilities. User access to the statistics function can be restricted to certain groups of users, such as administrators. The graphs are created dynamically for the chosen timeframe. Encryption and security features: The system supports encryption and decryption of email using PGP, GNuPGP or S/MIME. It is possible to archive messages prior to the encryption process, ensuring that the messages will be secured and viewable for compliance, legal or audit staff. Encrypted mail will be archived with the encryption intact and will require the proper keys to retrieve the messages. Every facet of the data is secured through user/group security access. Permissions can be established for various access levels throughout the system. TCP/IP sockets are utilized for server-to-server communications and HTTPS secure transfer protocol can be utilized for server communication from the web-tier. Full audit logging of all events executed within the system is captured and maintained. The archive security model ensures that only those who are defined to have access to specific mailboxes will be able to access those messages and their attachments. Metadata features: Metadata is collected starting at the mail server. As discussed above, categories are also added to document metadata. Legal Review process allows addition of disposition (privilege, responsiveness) and comment/ annotations. Scalability: There are no limitations to the number of records supported, number of users or number of servers. The solution is scalable both horizontally with number of archive servers and vertically where major functions can be isolated on a separate server and searches can be federated across multiple archive servers. The AXS-One archive tier regularly processes 30-200GB of data per day on a single server. One customer ingests 0.5 TB of information nightly. Full text indexing is included in this processing. No database is used. We bundle small documents (i.e., email) together and write data serially to the files system. Top five management features: Chain of custody and compliance; error-proof search wizard; Extensible Process Management framework; system administration through a Notes interface; end-user benefits include not worrying about quotas and integration with Desktop Search tools. Archiving platform integration: AXS-Link for Lotus Notes is an integral component of the of the AXS-One Compliance Platform, a single software platform and archiving repository designed to manage disparate electronic records including email (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Sun Java Systems Messaging Servers and Standard Internet formatted messages) and Instant Messages (such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Reuters, Sametime), from initial capture and indexing through to