Score: 4.25 out of 5Editor’s note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.
Tangent’s DataCove is a more general-purpose appliance than the Intradyn one we tested, as it provides discovery and reporting features in addition to the write-once/read-many tape functionality that both appliances have. It can also support adding storage, either hard disk or an additional tape library to supplement the internal tape drive, while the Intradyn has an integrated tape library to which you can’t add more storage.
Installation of the appliance is straightforward, but customers will want to avail themselves of the included installation support, as the details in the documentation on how to configure Exchange or another e-mail server (the DataCove appliance also supports GroupWise and Lotus Notes through optional connectors, as well as any SMTP-based e-mail system) to work with the appliance are rather sparse and non-specific.
Messages are indexed on the appliance. Tangent supports having the Exchange server forward all mail to the appliance using the journaling function, but you can also set up the appliance as an SMTP gateway, which allows it to capture all incoming or outgoing SMTP traffic for your site. Although if you use this method, you’ll need to do some additional configuration to capture internal e-mails as well.
One interesting feature is that this device is designed to create both a searchable archive on disk and a WORM archive on tape for compliance purposes. It can also archive all IM traffic from MSN, AOL, Yahoo and ICQ, with an add-on module.
An Outlook connector allows users to search and restore messages from within Outlook and searches can be performed through a Web client, as well. The search criteria are flexible and powerful, and searches ran very quickly. Permissions granted to auditors are very granular with 21 permissions available.
Other functionality such as policy enforcement is limited – the auditor can search for e-mails that meet certain criteria but not receive automated notification of violations. E-mails and attachments are not removed from the Exchange store when they are archived, so managing mailbox sizes is not possible.
The DataCove is focused primarily on data retention for legal standards, and does that very well, using its integrated tape drive to create the WORM archives of data required by many legal standards, ensuring that data hasn’t been modified after it was archived, in addition to easily accessible archives on hard disk inside the appliance for indexing and e-discovery applications.
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