ZL Technologies is unique within the marketplace for having a completely unified and integrated solution based on open standards and a highly scalable GRID architecture. ZL Unified Archive boasts some of the highest performance and scalability numbers in the industry while empowering our customers to take advantage of inexpensive, off the shelf hardware and open standard components.
The ZL solution is the result of a deep-seated commitment to product development and long-term customer satisfaction. ZL is proud to say that we’ve replaced every major solution in the marketplace, while never having lost an enterprise customer to a competitor.
ZL Technologies offers a software solution that addresses the following goals:
- Retention and Regulatory Requirements
- Lowered E-Discovery Costs and Expedited E-Discovery Response
- Elimination of PSTs
- Flexible Deployment Architecture
- Cost and Storage Efficiency
- Comprehensive and Consistent End-User Mailbox Experience
Retention and Regulatory Requirements
ZL provides a robust classification and tagging capability that can categorize mails at various level, i.e. global, departmental, user or content level retention policies. This tagging and classification method allows the City to build an “Intelligent Archive”. An “Intelligent Archive” enables the customer to search faster, store data more efficiently, and apply retention policies based upon targeted Corporate Policies. Regardless of regulation, ZL can provide the appropriate retention as needed.
Lowered E-Discovery Costs and Expedited E-Discovery Response
The majority of litigation costs are related to the capture and processing of unindexed, uningested data and the identification of relevant evidence. ZL is able to apply preservation orders and attorney client privilege flagging automatically while dramatically reducing times for search results. The scalability of ZL’s search and discovery provides superior culling and early case assessment. By performing all of these functions within the unified archive, fewer steps and technologies are needed to accomplish the same tasks, saving time, and overall costs while minimizing mistakes.
Elimination of PSTs
Due to limitations in the size of an e-mail data store for operational reasons (such as time to recover) and the increasing costs to store large mailboxes on the statewide system, many agencies have their users move the messages off the statewide e-mail system. This movement is often to a personal message storage folder on the desktop computer or to a network file server. Although most e-mail systems support archiving old messages to personal message folders (usually on the desktop system), every folder and subfolder must be set up individually. These messages are usually not backed up, often grow to take up a large amount of disk space, and have limits on size, which when exceeded, can cause corruption. In addition, these growing personal libraries of e-mail messages are creating legal concerns regarding the City’s exposure to costly legal discovery processes. Important evidential, entitlement, and historical information contained in e-mail messages are often lost as users do not necessarily know how to use the tools. Often Information Technology professionals are unaware of the records retention value, and these files are wiped from machines when the machine is being set up for another user.
Flexible, Speedy and Simple Deployment
As a vendor to a wide range of multi-national corporations, ZL is currently deployed as a flexible, centralized architecture as well as a hybrid decentralized architecture, maximizing customer needs whether be of performance, availability, continuity, or legal consideration. ZL’s unique and proven GRID architecture ensures that both reliability and throughput are maximized. Run the ZL GRID on any hardware, with any mail system, using any database.
ZL’s ability to run 100% virtualized on identical images (unique in the industry) cuts deployment time to hours and eliminates the need to repeat server configuration at installation. Additionally, ZL focuses on open standards and flexible integration as a fundamental component of the overall IT ecosystem. This philosophy is advantageous since it leverages existing corporate investments:
- ZL works completely within an established virtual machine environment.
- ZL works with any centralized enterprise storage device including all major WORM disc solutions, NAS, SAN, or DASD devices. Use existing storage devices.
- ZL works with any off the shelf hardware and most major OSes (Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.). Use existing OS.
- ZL works with a multitude of messaging and data formats, file systems, and content management solutions.
- ZL works with all major databases (e.g. Oracle, MS SQL, and IBM DB2). Use existing DB.
- ZL works with standard DR and back-up technologies. Use all existing infrastructure.
- As an extensible architecture, ZL is modular, adding new capabilities and tools every few months, effectively delivering a future-proof platform for future projects.
Cost and Storage Efficiency
Though broadly claimed by all vendors, single instancing within ZL is dramatically different from any other competitor. Whereas most vendors single instance within a single vault or group container, ZL utilizes a concept called Global Single Instancing (GSI), which ensures that all mails across multiple groups, across applications, across capture methods, and across mail server types are automatically single instanced. ZL enjoys this capability due to a unified structure and commitment to open standards. Witness to various migrations, GSI has seen storage savings of 80% over data that had been previously single instanced by a legacy vendor. No other vendor has better SIS than ZL.
Comprehensive and Consistent End-User Mailbox Experience
ZL delivers a powerful yet consistent end-user mailbox experience unmatched in the industry. Whether the user is working through their Outlook client, OWA web client, or Blackberry mobile client, they will be provided maximum access and capabilities available while on and offline as appropriate. End-users will not only be able to access their archived emails through these devices, but also search for any historic email and restore emails without administrative involvement. ZL’s intuitive User Experience requires no end-user training.
ZL Technologies’ unified approach not only delivers on the functionality and performance mentioned above but also minimizes total cost of ownership. Because ZL is a single vendor, delivering all components of the solution on a single platform, there is zero cost overlap between modules, reducing total cost of ownership as much as possible.
This differs from all major competitors, which rely on OEM components for engines as critical as the search engine, MTA, retention, or policy engine, often using end-of-life’d components such as AltaVista in ways for which they were not designed.
Moreover, instead of bearing the cost of acquisition and long term management for multiple vendor technologies, ZL customers benefit from working with a single vendor, a single technology. In this initiative, ZL Technologies offers a complete solution for email archiving, storage management, regulatory retention, mobile archive access, and storage optimization on a common platform. All reports, audit trails, policies, and management data are consolidated and centralized.
Lastly, ZL is the only solution built on 100% open standards. This means that regardless of the environment of the customer (Windows, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, etc.); regardless of existing database expertise (Oracle, MS SQL, IBM DB2); or even hardware or storage preference, ZL is completely agnostic and runs equally well on all configurations. Nor will customer data ever be held hostage in a proprietary format.
In contrast, the major archiving vendors are typically only able to run on a single operating system, only a single type of database, often storing in a proprietary format. This critically restricts the firm from future changes, limiting long-term flexibility. And as an inherently persistent application, restrictions forced upon the customer by an archiving solution will have a permanent, lasting impact. Attempts to move away from legacy vendors are extremely costly. ZL’s flexibility and open standards philosophy eliminates this issue.