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Enterprise Vault™ Installing and Configuring

Last Published: 2018-04-09

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (12.3)

About Enterprise Vault single instance storage

Enterprise Vault's optimized single instance storage can provide a significant reduction in the storage space that is required for archived items. Enterprise Vault identifies the shareable parts (SIS parts) of an item, such as a message attachment or the contents of a document. It stores each SIS part separately, and only once within a sharing boundary. A sharing boundary can include one or more vault stores within a vault store group. When Enterprise Vault identifies a SIS part that it has already stored in the target vault store's sharing boundary, it references the stored SIS part file instead of archiving the SIS part again.

Enterprise Vault applies a minimum size threshold for SIS parts. The size threshold enables Enterprise Vault to balance the likely storage savings against the resources that are required to create, archive, and retrieve the SIS parts.

Enterprise Vault single instance storage can save storage space in a number of ways:

Enterprise Vault shares the SIS parts between all the vault stores within a sharing boundary. For example, if you use separate vault stores for journaling and mailbox archiving, Enterprise Vault can share the SIS parts between the vault stores.
If a number of separate messages with the same attachment are sent to multiple recipients, Enterprise Vault stores the attachment only once within a sharing boundary.
Enterprise Vault identifies a SIS part from the content, not the file name. If two messages both have the same file attachment, Enterprise Vault can share the attachments, even if they have different file names.
Enterprise Vault can share the identical SIS parts that result from different types of archiving, such as an Exchange message attachment that is also stored as a file on a file server.

A new vault store uses single instance storage by default, and shares only the SIS parts of items that are archived within itself. You can run the Configure Sharing wizard on a vault store group to extend sharing between vault stores, or to turn off Enterprise Vault single instance storage if you want.

Note the following:

Partitions on Dell EMC Centera devices. Enterprise Vault single instance storage is not performed when items are stored to partitions that are hosted on Dell EMC Centera devices. Enterprise Vault provides a separate device-level sharing option to take advantage of the sharing capabilities of Centera devices.
See About Centera device-level sharing.
Smart partitions. Enterprise Vault shares the SIS parts between items in the same smart partition, but it does not share the SIS parts between a smart partition and other partitions.
For example, suppose that two employees receive the same email, which has an attachment. For compliance reasons, Enterprise Vault archives one employee's emails to a smart partition; it archives the other employee's emails to the standard vault store partition. If Enterprise Vault first archives the email and its attachment to the standard partition then, when it subsequently archives the email to the smart partition, it should not normally archive the attachment again. This would mean that the data on the smart partition is not fully compliant, however, so in this case Enterprise Vault archives both the email and the attachment again.