Sometimes it's the mundane problems that waste the most time. Consider e-mail. When Microsoft Exchange message stores grow too large, they degrade the performance of Exchange servers. To prevent the uncontrolled growth of users' mailbox content, some administrators set quotas that shut down a user's e-mail if his mailbox grows too large. But users get grumpy when faced with the loss of their e-mail, and administrators must either force users to delete old messages or manually reset their e-mail quotas. And if a user accidentally deletes a vital message, searching for it in old backup files can take hours.

New York-based KVS PLC claims to have a better way, with Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange. The company's information archiving and retrieval tool automatically moves e-mail messages further into a company's storage environment as those messages age and indexes them so they can be retrieved for regulatory, legal or other purposes.

'They address two key business needs for Exchange users,' says analyst Mark Levitt at IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm. 'One is the need to offload storage from both local and primary servers to backup servers and archival servers.' Those backup and archival servers are less expensive than primary servers, says Levitt, and moving older e-mail to them helps keep primary e-mail servers running at peak performance.

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The second need is disaster recovery, since having an easily searchable archive of e-mail helps companies recover from the failure of a primary Exchange server.

'What Exchange is good at is the dynamic, minute-to-minute information,' says Nigel Dutt, co-founder and chief technology officer at KVS. 'What we're good at is the big-bulk, long-term, high-volume storage.'

Enterprise Vault was first developed by Digital Equipment Corp. but was acquired by KVS after Compaq Computer Corp.'s acquisition of Digital. It runs on a dedicated Windows NT or 2000 server and supports multiple Exchange servers, automatically moving aging e-mail from users' mailboxes to the Enterprise Vault store. From there, e-mail can either be deleted or moved to secondary or tertiary storage.

Microsoft Exchange allows users to store old messages in personal information store (PST) files. But Dutt claims that Enterprise Vault is superior to using PST files because such files can't exceed 2GB and can be accessed only by users.

Off-line But Accessible

Since March, the Alberta Department of Energy in Canada has been using Enterprise Vault to archive 80GB of Exchange 5.5 data, says network analyst Judy Glazier. Beyond the advantage of not having to back up PST files, she says, her 1,000 users can search Enterprise Vault themselves for missing messages or file attachments.

Glazier says she's been pleased with the performance and ease of use but recommends having KVS do the installation and configuration. Enterprise Vault 'isn't a very easy product to install and set up,' she says.

Jackson National Life Insurance Co. in Lansing, Mich., considered using Enterprise Vault but was initially reluctant to buy from a small start-up, says director of network services Brian Gunnell. This spring, however, the insurer purchased Enterprise Vault for some users, and Gunnell says the product has been 'very easy to manage, very easy to administer.' He says the company plans to deploy it enterprisewide this summer.

KVS pitches Enterprise Vault as a knowledge management tool that could help mine Exchange e-mail for vital information. Users and analysts say that's a future concern, and they're more impressed with Enterprise Vault for its ability to solve common e-mail management problems today.

The Buzz: State of the Market

Managing the Exchange Store

With 50 million to 60 million Microsoft Exchange users worldwide, there's built-in demand for any tool that can make an e-mail administrator's life easier. Within that user base, between 30% and 60% have enough of a need and the ability to pay for an archiving tool such as KVS's Enterprise Vault, says Tom Grace, research director at research firm Open Systems Advisor Inc. in Boston.

The sweet spot for KVS, says Grace, will be companies that are large enough to face e-mail storage challenges or companies of any size that have a legal or regulatory requirement to store, track and retrieve e-mail.

KVS claims that Enterprise Vault could be used to sort through e-mail messages, attachments and other files to create knowledge management applications. But Grace says KVS 'is really part of the puzzle, not the complete solution' for such efforts. Current competitors include the following:

Veritas Software Corp.

Mountain View, Calif.

Veritas' NetBackup for Microsoft Exchange Server supports automatic, unattended backup for local or remote Exchange clients, as well as the ability to restore individual mailboxes, folders and messages. It offers backup and restore capabilities but not message searches.

Ixos Software AG

Munich, Germany

Ixos-ExchangeArchive allows the automatic archiving of complete e-mail messages or just attachments in a secure repository, as well as transparent user access to archived items from users' Exchange e-mail folders. Archival messages aren't searchable, however.

OTG Software Inc.

Bethesda, Md.

OTG's EmailXtender automatically stores and archives e-mail and attachments into its Enterprise Message Center, with full-text indexing and searching of messages and attachments.

Scheier is a freelance writer in Boylston, Mass.

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