ANTenna Blog -- Storage

That's the question posed by Danny Milgrad, Symantec senior manager, product marketing for Enterprise Vault. In a recent survey, Milgrad said, only 15% of IT managers answered yes. Milgrad, like many others, is counting on Microsoft Exchange 2010 to reshape the storage landscape.

Milgrad used the announcement of Symantec's support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 to decry the current state of storing unstructured information -- especially amongst SMBs.

The question above is only the beginning of the scary stats he trotted out.

In 2007, Milgrad said, 54% of storage shipped was used for unstructured information, and storage growth increasing more than 50% per year. Perhaps that why he cited Gartner that while IT budgets are rose 2% in 2008, storage budgets jumped 75%. And the top driver for that storage growth? E-mail, according to a 2007 Merrill Lynch CIO Survey, Milgrad added.

According to Radicati, Milgrad said a typical user sends and receives 20MB per day in e-mail alone, and spends an hour a week managing e-mail (per Osterman Research).

In Symantec's own survey, e-mail and SharePoint content is growing mor than 30% per year. More than three quarters of IT respondents rank reducing storage requirements "important" or "extremely important," while
85% said the same about protecting information.

Everyone is counting on Exchange 2010 to help deal with this problem, and Symantec is a big supporter: the company is a trategic partner in the Exchange 2010 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and a Patinum sponsor of the Microsoft launch. In addition to the Backup Exec System Recovery launched last week, NetBackup 7 and Backup Exec 2010 are due in early 2010 with Enterprise Vault Exchange 2010 support planned for Spring 2010.

He says Symantec Enterprise Vault can extend the benefits of Exchange 2010 by automating migration away from the dreaded PST files. It also offers multiple archiving options outside the Exchange environment as well as offline access to archived e-mails. Finally, it adds SIS, compression, expiry, and storage tiering as well as support for CAS and WORM storage.

And back to the original question, Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator can search not just Exchange but also SharePoint and file system content. Still, I'd run a couple tests before agreeing to take that bet.

More From bMighty:

• Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Promises Proactive Protection For SMBss
• SMB Security Survey Shows Sorry State Of Cyber Safety

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