A building block is a repeatable unit of Enterprise Vault functionality hosted on an application server. By adding sufficient building blocks, Enterprise Vault can be extended to scale to the largest of workloads, as shown in Figure: Enterprise Vault building blocks.

Each building block comprises a full set of Enterprise Vault services that deliver archiving, indexing, storage, search and retrieval functions.

The combined services form a unit known as a building block, which is identified by a building block name.

Each building block is hosted on a particular server, but in the event of a disaster on that server Enterprise Vault can failover a building block to another server (without the need for clustering technology). Failover does not require any reconfiguration on the desktop and users are unaffected.