Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

I’m working on a new feature article for Storage Magazine focused on selecting an enterprise email archiving product.  This is something I’ve done quite a bit of work around, so I decided to redirect it into a “bride magazine” type “ten things to look for” item.  If you too know about the field of email archiving products, how about weighing in with a comment or email with your opinion?

Without further ado:

The ten technical things some email archiving products do and others do not do*

1. Capture all messages - Can the archiving system really guarantee that every message is captured?  Really?  Even if a user does the old “double-delete” and gets rid of every copy on the system before the “archive sweep” happens?
2. Search and e-discovery - It’s amazing to me that some archiving systems have really terrible search capabilities.  But more important is whether they can handle real e-discovery requests from the legal department.
3. Record user metadata - Capturing what users do with a message (read, file, ignore, forward) is a tough nut to crack, and it might just be impossible with some archiving technologies!
4. Archive stuff other than email - Some are general archives that can take just about any content, while others are purpose-built for email.  I am hemming and hawing on whether this is critical in an email archiving product, and which is preferrable…
5. Security and chain of custody - How secure is the archive content?  If the answer is “kinda” then your legal department is not going to be happy!
6. Ingest an existing mail store or PST file - It’s great when an archiving system can capture every email once it’s installed, but it’s a whole other matter to be able to pull in pre-existing content.  But beware!  You have to flag this stuff as possibly incomplete and perhaps even unreliable!
7. Integrate with mail clients - What does the end user see?  Is it an unfamiliar web link or a reassuring Outlook window?  What about Outlook Web Access users?  Or the 8,000 other email clients?
8. Allow off-line access - Can a user access the archive when they’re on a plane?  Can they see it on the train?  Would they, could they in the park?  Will you, will you when your data center goes dark?
9. Integrate with third-party tools - How well will the archive really serve legal if it can’t export messages to their favorite search tool?  Note - some can even talk directly with these products!
10. Integrate with mobile users - Ok, I am on an iPhone in the enterprise crusade, but I’ll admit that lots of folks use BlackBerries and Windows Mobile (and Symbian) too.  How can they access the archive?

I’ve worked with most of the products out there, and know who can and can’t do these things.  But not all are important to everyone, so I just can’t say “this product is best.”  But I’m very interested in your opinion.  What key technical differentiators would you suggest?

* Not the actual article title!

I travel for work. I also travel for pleasure. You could say I travel a lot - not as much as some but definitely a lot. For example, I’ve spent at least one day in another state almost every week so far in 2008. Although getting there is never really fun, it can be made slightly better by mixing in some of the latest and greatest social services from our fabulous Internet. Read on and see why I love Kayak, TripIt, and FlyerTalk.

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Lotsa people use and love data de-duplication (to hyphen or not - that is the question) technology for backup and archiving, but it looks like this tech is about to bust out for primary, live, real, mainstream, what-you-are-using-to-store-your-stuff storage. Big news!

First up was the company now officially called NetApp, which officially blessed the use of their advanced single instance storage (A-SIS) de-dupe tech for primary storage use as of now. They added block-based de-dupe way back when, and even said people could use it for primary storage, but it doesn’t look like that happened much. So the new release of OnTap 7G includes performance tweaks and more powerful blessing from the company, making this the first play for primary storage de-dupe that I know of. Some have been (predictably) skeptical of Network Appliance NetApp’s A-SIS technology, but others appreciate the results…

Next is the smarties over at Hifn, who make super (de)duper storage controller hardware that often finds its way into OEM products. On Monday, the company announced availability of a card that can handle de-duplication, compression, and encryption, though not all three at once and only at 250 megabyte per second speed. And it looks like a partnership with Freescale Semiconductor will give a big performance boost later in the year, enabling gigabyte per second throughput and all three functions at once. This could really be something, with upstart OEMs launching de-duping storage arrays for little bucks before Storage Decisions comes to San Francisco!

Image by Gila Brand, used according to Creative Commons 2.5 license

Imagine there was someone many people loved to hate, but grudgingly loved just the same because of their incredible prowess. In Red Sox Nation, that would be Alex Rodriguez, who we follow year after year with a mix of admiration, envy, and anger as he seems to make all the right moves for the wrong team. Lots of IT people feel the same about Microsoft, whose runaway success is only slightly tempered by occasional schadenfreude when a misstep is made. In our little corner of the world, storage pros have even more reason to wonder how Microsoft can continue to make good move after good move.

It wasn’t always like this - be thankful if you don’t remember FTEDIT! But ever since Windows 2000, Redmond has made improvement after improvement, remaking “bad (SAN) citizen” Windows into Martha Stewart. But unlike the latter, Microsoft hasn’t called much attention to its skills, and this is a shame…

Take iSCSI - Microsoft was an early supporter of the protocol, releasing an excellent software iSCSI driver as a free download. They also bundle a limited (but continuously-improving) volume manager with all modern versions of Windows. Then there’s VSS, which is the first hardware-independent (even hardware-free!) snapshot API I know of. I’ve written articles (1, 2) on Windows storage technologies which go into these in more detail.

But one question that came up in my virtualization seminar made me realize that I forgot one key piece of Gates-tech: MPIO. See, Microsoft has also been bundling a free hardware-independent multipath I/O driver in server editions of Windows since 2003, but lots of folks haven’t gotten the memo. It’s good stuff: A generic driver with device-specific modules (DSMs) for different storage array and network types. MPIO handles transparent multi-path failover (for availability) and load balancing (for performance).

If you have iSCSI, you simply must try MPIO since Microsoft’s own free DSM supports about everything you need, and compatibility is required for logo support. And if you’re on Fibre Channel, you’re probably in luck, too, since most major vendors provide DSMs for their arrays (but some might not be free, I’m told).

So there you have it. Another excellent (and free!) Microsoft product that you (probably) never heard of, cutting out proprietary solutions (at least for Windows Server…)

Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp.

This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and NetApp is what lots of people (even me) have long called the company. Plus, it’s never good to have your company name be the same as one of your products, at least when you make more than one. And NetApp has lots of different products, many of which are not network appliances…

They’ve added a new logo, too, which ironically looks like a thick blue dolmen to me, but was probably supposed to evoke a door and the letter, N. I always liked the old round peg in a round hole idea, myself… But then again, I always kinda liked yellow and purple and silver storage devices, too!

Remember the old days, when it was Apple Computer, HP still stood for Hewlett-Packard, Sun for Stanford University Network, and EMC for Evil Machine Company? (Just kidding, guys, I know it was Egan, Marino and Einstein’s equation…) But the world will end if IBM ever changes its logo!

Update: More coverage:

• Marc Farley liked the old logo better
• Robin Harris is wined and dined by NetApp in New York - where’s my invite, guys?
• Rajeev Karamchedu thinks it looks like an IBM lego house…
• Zerowait calls it a staple and compares it to New Coke - Ouch!
• The Register is even less complimentary…

Image by Andrew Dunn courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-sa-2.0

One of the hits from my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar this week was a discussion of the relative merits of different storage protocols. Sounds deadly, but this can be quite a religious issue for folks, and it generated lively debate. I’m firmly in the “do what works” camp - there is no always-right protocol, and they all can work.

In the interests of all, I’d like to point out two delicious sources of VMware storage protocol wisdom:

An internal paper from VMware’s performance folks titled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance shows that, as expected, Fibre Channel has the lowest CPU overhead and best overall throughput. But, no surprise to anyone who’s tested alternatives, iSCSI and NFS also work pretty darn well! And you can knock that extra CPU load right down to the FC level with an iSCSI HBA.

Next up is a best practices paper from Network Appliance that is chock full of VMware storage goodness. If you’re curious about the potentials of NFS storage for VMDKs, this paper is a must-read! I’m pretty impressed with what VMware over NFS has to offer.

By the way, my next seminars are June 24 and 26 in Atlanta and San Francisco, respectively. I’ll also be presenting some related content at Storage Decisions in Chicago in May and Toronto in June.

Update:  Marc Farley talks back - isolate your networks, people!

Google added a nifty feature to their arsenal of sorta-world-taking-over products the other day (while I was away) - chatback. This lets us webby-writing people add a special chat balloon to our pages which lets random strangers google-talk with us.  So I added it to my sites and actually had a productive use for it today!  But not all is bunnies and flowers…

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