Enterprise Vault Archive Migrations

EAS archives are moved in one step, directly into Enterprise Vault.

There’s no need for interim disk space or need to convert into interim formats (such as PST or EML files) during migration.  This saves both cost and time.  It also preserves chain-of-custody as your data is moved.

Transvault moves data into your EV environment using a connector which uses the approved Enterprise Vault API.  In fact Transvault was the first migration solution to be approved under the Symantec Technology Enabled Program (STEP).  This ensures 100% reliability for your move.

Transvault provides a comprehensive shortcut management service that ensures users have a seamless experience when they migrate.

In the situation where shortcuts aren’t supported by the target (for example, if you’re migrating from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft Exchange or Office 365), legacy shortcuts are replaced (rehydrated) with the original item. Transvault is very flexible, providing the ability to migrate data to primary and archive mailboxes.

Users can often move shortcuts or update information on shortcuts for example, altering labels or follow-up information none of which gets reflected on the item in the archive. To provide the highest fidelity of migration, Transvault can capture information from the shortcut and ensure this is reflected on the migrated item.

Similarly, where users have deleted their shortcuts, you can configure Transvault not to migrate the corresponding item, as this is confusing and causes concern for end users when deleted items reappear.

This service is vital, as not all archive platforms keep track of shortcut re-foldering and deletion activity.

Moving to EV or other 3rd party archives

If the migration is to another EV system or another platform that supports shortcuts then as your data is moved, the corresponding shortcut is converted to point to the new archive. This activity can take place whilst users are online – there’s no need for any downtime or for users to logout.

Yes.  You can move EAS journal archives into EV journal archives.  To do this Transvault reconstructs EAS journals into the format required by EV.

It also offers many other capabilities that will ease your move, including the ability to split journals (and other large mailboxes) into a number of separately handled virtual mailboxes of a user-defined size.  This allows multiple processing threads to be applied to the migration of a single journal mailbox, significantly speeding up the migration task.

You also get full chain-of-custody and detailed audit tracks as your data is moved, enabling you to satisfy the most demanding compliance needs.

Transvault’s CloudStream feature, combines the latest Microsoft ingestion technologies with sophisticated algorithms, such as traffic flow analysis, to guarantee unrivalled ingestion speeds into Microsoft Office 365.

Your chosen archive migration partner can establish a proof of concept (POC) to establish likely throughput rates in your specific environment. They will also be able to give you guideline speeds seen at other customer sites for a similar migration path.

It is important to note, achieving best performance is always dependent on environmental factors such as:

• Available network bandwidth
• Speed of the storage subsystem on which the legacy archive sits as well as the destination storage
• The ingestion performance of the target system (typical speeds may range from 1-1.5 TB / 24-hour period)
• The scheduling of other project elements such the commissioning of the target environment.

Also note that migration speeds we refer to are end-to-end migration times, and not just extraction speeds into an interim format. Extraction speeds are misleading as this is only half of the ‘story’ (as the extracted data then needs to be ingested into the target archive).

Transvault provides dynamic and advanced migration scheduling capabilities to ensure migration speed (and therefore potential system/network) can be tuned on a 24×7 basis.

Transvault has connectors that link directly into your AXS-One archive store and Enterprise Vault stores.

In fact, Transvault was the first solution in the market to have its archive connectors certified by Symantec (now Veritas) under the STEP program.

Using these connections your email records are moved in one transaction, ensuring optimum speed and reliability for your move.

Yes. TransVault offers migration and conversion capability between Exchange and Notes archives. E.g.

An organization using AXS-One for Notes can migrate their contents to say, Enterprise Vault for Exchange or Office 365, using TransVault to perform the migration along with on-the-fly email format conversion.

In most cases, Transvault can convert shortcuts so they work with the new archive system.

Where necessary, Transvault can re-write internal email addresses so that legacy emails can be successfully replied to.  This is useful in the event of a merger or other scenario where the email address may have changed.

Transvault also includes the ability to decrypt Notes emails where passwords can be made available.

Additionally, organizations can actually reduce the time it takes to migrate their ‘live’ email system between Exchange and Notes by taking advantage of migrating their archives first, as this can be done in a way that does not impact end users.  In fact some organizations ramp up their archiving so that they can minimize the size of the live mailboxes that need to be migrated as a ‘foreground’ exercise.

Benchmark testing has further shown that Transvault has superior conversion performance and message format fidelity when compared with leading third-party mailbox migration applications.

Transvault includes comprehensive auditing that tracks the migration of each individual item. In the event of a future eDiscovery, the audit enables you to prove that you have not lost items during the move and that chain-of-custody has been maintained.

Reporting is also available to highlight how much data has been moved for each ‘mailbox‘ in the archive. See also Q11-14 for more information on compliance-related issues.

Developed with the support of Veritas, Transvault can move data directly into or out of Enterprise Vault using the EV approved API. We recommend using the API wherever possible, as this is the only route that is fully supported by Veritas.

In addition to using the API, Transvault offers an alternative approach whereby it can go directly to the underlying EV storage partitions and retrieve the data directly. A direct approach can perform several times faster than using the API. The direct approach also has several other advantages:

• Avoids potential stability issues of the EV platform which can become unstable underload and
  was never designed/specified for large extraction of data
• Avoids concerns about impact on end users due to EV system performance during migration
• Can migrate from EV system versions 7.5 or earlier
• Can migrate data from the EV system even if it’s no longer running!

In fact, customers have the option of using Transvault’s unique hybrid connector, which combines
speed with safety: if an item can’t be accessed using a direct connection, Transvault automatically
switches to using the API connector.

Ultimately, if your migration needs to meet Veritas recommendations, you can use the API
exclusively – the great thing is that Transvault gives you the choice, which is also totally unique.

The first migration solution to be certified for use with Enterprise Vault, and available from global network of Transvault Certified Migration Masters, including Veritas Partners and Veritas Consulting Services, Transvault quickly and securely migrates legacy archived email into, out of, and around the Enterprise Vault (EV) platform.

Example migration scenarios include:

• Moving all EV data into Microsoft Office 365 as part of company transition away from on-prem
  solutions.
• Moving from an ‘unsatisfactory’ or obsolete archive into EV (virtually all third-party email archives and common email formats, including PST, EML, MSG and NSF files, are supported)
• EV upgrades – using Transvault you can migrate EV older versions to the latest release
• EV storage moves to protect against obsolescence and lock-in (e.g. extraction from EMC Centera)
• Standardization onto EV (e.g. where merging organizations have incompatible systems)
• Conversion of an EV for Lotus Notes archive to an EV for Exchange archive (and vice versa)

All data movement is fully audited to ensure chain-of-custody, and mailbox shortcuts are fully managed to ensure a seamless experience for end users as they move.   

Enterprise Vault has the Move Archive tool to enable storage upgrades or moves, this utility is only suitable for moving smaller amounts of data such as individual mailboxes.

Using Transvault you can initially profile your existing archive usage – e.g. how much storage is being used, how many archive stores there are, the average mailbox size, total number of items etc.

You can then be selective in what you migrate and to where. E.g. you might want to migrate a department of users at a time to a specific new archive store or re-group users according to archive storage consumption.

Compliance regulations permitting, it’s also possible to:

• Move just the last n years-worth of data,
• Move only the data that users still have shortcuts to,
• Not move emails that have [SPAM] in the subject, etc

Transvault can also be used to quickly move old vaults into the newer EV OSIS architecture, resulting in great storage benefits. For example, a US energy giant used Transvault to migrate to upgrade EV and literally halved its email storage costs, thanks to EV’s improved Single Instance Storage.

You might also want to move from a single EV server to a failover cluster or move your data from legacy storage, such as EMC Centera, to a new storage platform. Transvault can also be used to consolidate vaults belonging to different organizations and domains. This includes the ability to re-write internal email addresses (where permissible) such that retrieved emails can be replied to without having to edit the email address manually.

EV has built-in features that enable data to be extracted and imported to/from PST files or to another EV server. It has No ability to move data to Microsoft Office 365.

Issues specifically associated with using ‘native’ EV migration tools include:

• It’s slow – This is a single-threaded process which is intended for simple mailbox moves. It is was never designed for wholesale migrations. It is also just half of the migration exercise – see notes below.
• No shortcut awareness – The EV tool does not have awareness of which items have shortcuts. This means if you export data, it will be everything in the archive, which will mean users are presented with data they believe was deleted years ago. So not only do you have a storage space issue, you have user issues as well. Likewise, shortcuts in user’s mailboxes will not be converted or re-hydrated (if migrating to platforms such as Exchange or Office 365) as the corresponding items are migrated.
• It’s manually intensive – The native tool needs to be manually overseen (i.e. you could not batch several mailboxes to migrate unattended overnight).
• There’s no error logging – If a mailbox extraction fails owing to a corrupted email, the extraction will stop with no indication of which item was corrupted and no ability to pick up where you left off.
• There’s no auditing and minimal reporting.
  o No chain of custody reports
  o No reports to track progress during the migration
  o No comprehensive reports at the end of the migration

Notes
Performance comparison: A project to extract 10.5 million emails from a leading on-premise solution using built-in PST extraction took 5.5 man months to run (and re-run) Migrator is benchmarked to migrate the same amount of data in 24 hours.

Cost comparison: Manually exporting the contents of a single mailbox into a PST file can take 1.5-3 hours (depending on size), with additional time required for checking completion, updating manual logs, fixing corruptions etc. Hiring a temp (at $18/hour) to manually migrate PST files, and an average mailbox migration time of 3 hours would cost around $54 per mailbox. Bearing in mind this is just half the process (the PST files would then need to be ingested into the target archive) manual migration costs can reach > $100 per mailbox.

Generally speaking, any approach that relies on migration using interim files such as PSTs or EML files will encounter the following challenges:

• Loss of chain-of-custody. Multiple steps risk loss of control over your data.
• Need for interim storage space. PST files in particular are space-inefficient, so you’ll need lots of extra storage to pre-stage your data.
• Potential loss of integrity. When using multiple intermediary conversions – i.e. from format A to format B then from B to C (instead of direct from A to C) there is always the potential to lose information along the way with each conversion.

By comparison Transvault offers multi-threaded, multi-server, high-speed extraction with full error logging and 1-step chain-of-custody, migrating data direct from the source to the destination in one stream.

It also offers advanced shortcut management services to ensure users retain transparent access to their emails post migration.

Yes. Legacy Public Folders can be migrated out of Enterprise Vault for Exchange and into:

• Office 365 Public Folders
• Microsoft Exchange Public Folders (either Legacy or Modern Public Folders)
• PST files (for ingestion into any target platform that supports this format)
• Public Folder archives in Enterprise Vault for Exchange (e.g. a newer version of EV)

You can also use Transvault to migrate Public Folders still hosted on Exchange into Office 365.

Transvault is ideal for EV to EV data manipulations such as archive consolidations, version upgrades, moving user accounts and updating storage hardware. Benefits offered by Transvault include:

• High-volume data handling: Transvault is proven in many EV-EV migration projects handling tens of TBs of data. It offers a highly scalable architecture and extreme flexibility for coping with the largest, most complex environments.
• Detailed reports: Transvault generates detailed status reports that show totals of items found and migrated for each archived mailbox, along with any errors encountered, giving you total peace of mind.
• Preserves chain-of-custody: Transvault-powered migrations occur directly between the source and target, as a single, synchronous step, and as a fully audited process. Any solution that migrates using interim PST or EML files or interim copies of entire vaults risk breaking chain-of-custody.
• No need for temporary disk space: Migrator does NOT need interim disk space for during migration. It sends data direct from source to destination. This avoids issues around data security and saves both cost and inconvenience.
• Lots of flexibility: Transvault offers extremely advanced capabilities including detailed archive analysis, fine-grain data selection, sophisticated shortcut handling, address re-writing to support interdomain migrations, re-assigning multiple archives that may have been created for the same individual (e.g. due to re-locations, name-changes) etc.
• Fast yet secure migration: Transvault is a multi-threaded, multi-server-capable solution that can perform significantly faster than other methods. As well as offering a pure API approach, it uniquely offers the option of hybrid connectivity for optimum speed without risking the data integrity and completeness issues that a ‘purely direct’ approach introduces.

Transvault can filter items by user, groups, folders and dates, thus enabling data to be incisively migrated. For example, in the event of a merger or acquisition, you can combine or segregate the emails belonging to different custodians and move them to different destinations as required.

Transvault can optionally re-write internal email addresses in sender and recipient fields so that the email is reply-able with any new domain naming or recipient-addressing conventions.

If you need to process journal archives Transvault lets you select split them by recipient or domains so you can create two separate archives for example, each one then containing emails relevant to those employees in the split organisations.

Migration methods that rely on interim PST or EML files are subject to human error and have no tracking or auditing mechanism to prove that a migration was 100% successful.

As described earlier in this document, Transvault eliminates opportunity for human error: your data is automatically moved in 1 step, direct from the source to destination using banking-style transactions. Each item moved is checked for integrity to ensure your data will be viable in the new environment.

There’s also complete auditing of the migration process, with detailed reports that show 1:1 mappings of the ID of the item in the source archive and the ID of the new item as it is moved to the destination archive, enabling you to demonstrate of a complete ‘Chain of Custody’ for your data while undergoing migration. See also next question relating to the migration of journal compliance records.

This feature was developed by Microsoft as a way to preserve vital header information including BCC’d recipients and the expanded members of any distribution lists. From a compliance perspective, this data must be preserved and available for access when performing eDiscovery. Losing this vital recipient data would jeopardize the validity of any future eDiscovery case, as not all the people that received any given email would be included in an investigation.

Transvault supports fast, compliant migrations from EV to Office365, EV and several other platforms.

Support for Office 365 compliance model.
Unlike on-premises Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 doesn’t support the concept of a journal mailbox, instead each user mailbox maintains copies of items in a hidden area within each mailbox.

Transvault’s Compliance TimeMachine feature developed in conjunction with Microsoft, supports the migration of your existing EV journal data into this new storage model by allowing a ‘1 journal to many user mailboxes’ migration for journal messages. Such messages are not visible to end users nor do they consume quota. The messages are formatted so they are compatible with the Office 365 model.

By ensuring all your data is migrated intact, in a way that’s compliant with the Office365 model it ensures your critical journal data fully discoverable and stored in accordance with Microsoft’s licencing policies.

Journal archives tend to be extremely large, making a manual extraction approach slow and subject to size-related problems that can occur when using PST files as an interim store.

Transvault has unique features to allow very large journal and user archives to be processed at high speed by allowing many items to be migrated concurrently from the one archives.

Chain of custody refers to the reliable recording of processes and procedures that occur while evidence (physical or electronic) is being captured, held, transferred or disposed of.

It is vital that the evidence in question has remained free from alteration and that secure handling has been provided at all stages. This is important since any later data investigation or discovery against migrated emails will seek to validate that the data has been handled correctly and that nothing was missed out.

If at all possible, transferring your archives in 1 step, end-to-end, is the best way to preserve chain-of-custody. This approach avoids any chance of manual intervention or loss of tight control. Other migration techniques that involve extraction to interim storage areas and file formats (such as PST or EML files) risk your data being inadvertently lost, maliciously tampered with, or indeed corrupted while they are waiting to be ingested into the target archive. It is therefore difficult to vouch for the security of your data ‘in transit’. Transvault’s wide range of platform-specific connectors avoids the need to use interim formats, plus its optimized performance makes it viable to move directly across the network without making copies of your archive.

Additionally, Transvault’s forensic 1:1 auditing provides evidence that your data has been successfully transferred to a new environment, and provides both a source ID and target ID.

Yes. Transvault offers migration and conversion capability between Exchange and Notes archives.
E.g.

• An organization using EV for Notes can use Transvault to migrate (and convert) its archived emails into an Enterprise Vault for Exchange archive.
• An organization using Notes archiving platforms such as AXS-One, EMC EmailXtender, SourceOne and EAS for Notes can migrate their contents to EV for Exchange, using Transvault to perform the migration along with on-the-fly email format conversion.
• You can also migrate non-EV Notes archives (as well as .NSF files) into Enterprise Vault for Notes

In most cases, Transvault can convert shortcuts so they work with the new archive system.

Where necessary, Transvault can re-write internal email addresses so that legacy emails can be successfully replied to. This is useful in the event of a merger or other scenario where the email address may have changed. Transvault also includes the ability to decrypt Notes emails.

Additionally, organizations can reduce the time it takes to migrate their ‘live’ email system between Exchange and Notes by ramping up their archiving activity to minimize the size of the live mailboxes that need to be migrated. Benchmark testing has further shown that Transvault has superior conversion performance and message format fidelity when compared with leading 3rd-party mailbox migration applications.

Working with Transvault solutions gives you the choice of making your move on-premises or in the Cloud.

If you have existing server bandwidth and your migration is within the same location or domain, then a fully on-prem approach, with the option of local or remote control, may be the way to go.

Alternatively, you can make your move in Microsoft Azure.

Using Transvault in Azure means there’s no hardware to set up in advance. You also have the added benefits of built-in resilience, load balancing and distribution for geographically distributed locations. Plus, if you’re moving to Office 365, network latency is inherently reduced, resulting in faster data transfers.

Transvault Services have two tailored offerings: Managed Migration Services is a fully managed end-to-end migration service or Assisted Migration Services a service to allow knowledge transfer to internal teams for the delivery of your own migration with the support of Transvault throughout the migration.

Alternatively, you can sit back and relax with a complete managed migration service that includes expert advice on best practices, compliance know-how, project management, archive-specific expertise, expert troubleshooting and comprehensive management reporting.

You can also elect to run your migration on-premises or in the cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure).

One of our many specialist, Transvault certified partners across the globe will be able to advise on and deliver the appropriate Transvault products and services for your organisation.