Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Another Storage Decisions has come and gone, and 2008’s New York show did not disappoint. TechTarget always recruits an excellent set of conferencegoers, and not even the Wall Street crisis could dampen attendance. Even Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Dian Lane, Keira Knightley, John McCain, and Sarah Palin made appearances at this year’s show! (No, seriously, they were really there!)

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

My webinar on building a business case for email archiving was very well-attended, so I was not able to get to everyone during the question and answer section. Since the questions were really excellent, I thought I would include them (and my responses) here.

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There is nothing like presenting in the ballroom at the Hilton Chicago!

Storage Decisions returns to New York later this month, and I’ll be happy to be there. Although the Hilton New York isn’t as grand as the Chicago venue pictured, it’s still a great location and a better event!

This time around, I’ll have two sessions:

• Tuesday, September 23, at 1:45 PM is my Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Products, where I delve into my eleven essential attributes of email archiving and spill the beans about the real product differentiators
• Wednesday, September 24, at 2:45 I’ll be presenting Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Virtualization-In One Hour, a super-condensed version of my one-day storage virtualization seminar (just add water!)

If you haven’t yet decided to attend, please do consider applying for admission at TechTarget’s site.

On the other hand, if you’re planning to be there, please drop by and say hello! I’ll be around the exhibit hall on Tuesday evening, and will have my tail glued to an ask-the-experts chair on Wednesday through lunch.

I’ll be in Charlotte for my storage virtualization seminar in October, with another Storage Decisions in San Francisco coming up in November!

Do you know that need email archiving but just can’t get the project off the ground? I’ll be presenting a one-hour webinar called “Getting Your (Email Archiving) Project Approved” next Wednesday, August 27 at 1 PM Eastern time.

The session is presented by Mimosa, but the content is independent, so you won’t hear me pitch log shipping or trashing other vendors. Instead, I’ll focus on the benefits and beneficiaries of email archiving and how to make this critical technology a priority for the business, not just IT.

If you would like to attend, please register for the session at On24.

Email archiving has been a professional focus of mine for a while now, and I’ve previously written and spoken about the “eleven essential elements“.  So when TechTarget asked for an article for Storage magazine, I had a good well to draw on.  The latest issue of Storage magazine includes this article, titled “10 Key Considerations for Email Archiving” and I’m well pleased with it.  If you have a subscription, please do take a look.  Otherwise, you can find the article online.

I’ve covered these considerations previously, but let’s just mention them again here.  Each is covered in more detail in the article and in my webinar, but I welcome comments and questions here.

1. How complete is the archive?
2. Does it record what people do?
3. Can the archive ingest an existing mail store or PST files?
4. Can the archive handle multiple email systems?
5. What about non-message content?
6. What about deduplication?
7. Will the legal department be happy?
8. How does search work?
9. Can the archive easily integrate with third-party tools?
10. What will users think?

Whether you were at the show or missed it, most of the presentations from Storage Decisions in Chicago are now available for download.  These can be a great resource for internal communication and strategy - share the insights from the show to help make a case for change!

Most of the sessions were worthwhile, but I’d like to highlight a few of the sessions that I attended:

• Rich Castagna’s What Storage Managers Are Buying - always a highlight of the show, Storage Magazine’s survey results
• W. Curtis Preston’s Deduplication: The Perfect Solution to the Perfect Storm - it’s nice to have some sanity brought to the feverish talk of deduplication
• Ray Lucchesi’s Virtual DR - highlighting the value brought to disaster recovery from server virtualization (I missed this at the show)
• Marc Staimer’s Hidden Gotchas of Server Virtualization - I missed this one too, but Marc is brilliant and the content is right on

My two sessions are also available:

• Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Solutions - wherein I present my eleven points of differentiation and extoll the virtues of email archiving
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Storage Virtualization (In One Hour) - Overstuffed with content from my storage virtualization seminar

Now that my TechTarget Virtual Seminar on email archiving is finished, I wanted to share the questions and answers from the session here.  You will eventually be able to catch a recorded version of the presentation on TechTarget’s searchexchange.com site, and I’ll post when it’s out.

Interestingly, most questions revolved around justifying the purchase of email archiving solutions.  I didn’t capture all of the questions, but will try to summarize the justification-related ones here.

How can a small company archive email?

Although email archiving is expensive, it is critical to almost any organization.  Luckily, there are options for most people.  At the most minimal, you can roll your own archive by “forking” messages into a redundant email system using mail forwarding rules.  Many folks use open source UNIX mail servers for this since they’re especially inexpensive.  Next, consider Exchange 2007’s managed folders as a way to build a basic but fully-supported archiving system.  Another idea is to think about a managed service - many of these are much less expensive to set up than building a solution in house.  Finally, look around and you might find that there are indeed much more affordable products than the “big names” many people have heard about.

Archiving solutions tend to be very expensive for enterprises, what is the trade-off?

Archiving solutions are very expensive indeed. They are difficult to justify on purely cost (IT infrastructure) basis. You must bring the legal and business people to the table and get their buy-in to justify the cost. Simply put, email archiving is expensive but e-discovery is much more expensive. With the backing of the legal organization, the cost justification looks much more positive.

What should be considered to account for email archiving for D/R scenarios?

Another great question! Many managed solutions include integrated DR for the system, but may not capture messages during a disaster or communications interruption. Local solutions tend to rely on conventional DR concepts like synchronous replication. Again, this technology (and especially the telecom to support it) is very expensive, but the cost can be justified for some when balanced against legal risks.

I’ll post more Q&A from my upcoming Storage Virtualization Seminars in Atlanta and San Francisco as well as my Storage Decisions appearances in the coming months.

One of the surest of sure things in the storage industry right now is the potential for email archiving solutions.  There are literally dozens of products out there, with prices and functionality for pretty much any application.  And the growing demand for letigation hold and search has made this an essential technology for any organization - just ask the President!.

So how will you make your choice?  I previously talked about the essential differentiators, and now I’ve refined these into a more complete list I’m calling “The Eleven Essential Elements of Email Archiving”.  I capitalize this because it is the basis for much of my recent writing and speaking:  I just wrapped up an article for Storage magazine on the subject, to be published next month, and spoke on the topic at Storage Decisions in Chicago.

If you missed the show last week (or really really liked it!) and can’t wait for the magazine, may I suggest tuning in tomorrow for TechTarget’s Email and File Archiving Virtual Seminar?  You can catch my session at 1:30 Eastern, with a live Q&A session following.  Or you can tune in at 9 AM for the whole day-long extravaganza, featuring sessions from other good folks from Contoural and elsewhere.

Ever been to the TechTarget Storage Decisions conference?  It’s my favorite trade show, since it’s totally focused on end users - instead of being a product showcase, Storage Decisions is all about what real people need to do with their enterprise storage infrastructure.  Sure, there’s lots of technical product talk, but none of the speakers work for the hardware or software companies.  And did I mention that attendance is free?

If this sounds good to you, then now is the time to register for the Chicago show, coming up from May 13 through 15.  If you can attend, I strongly recommend coming in the day before the show so you don’t miss the kickoff on Tuesday morning.

As for me, I’ve got two sessions at the show this year, both on Wednesday the 14th.  Come in the morning for my Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Products, incorporating lots of the ideas I got from my Storage Magazine article and Webcast on the subject.  That afternoon, I’ll be presenting a shortened version of my Storage Virtualization Seminar, covering everything you wanted to know about virtualization technology in an hour instead of a day!  I’ll also be at the Ask the Experts Booth on the show floor on Tuesday evening if you’d like to come up and introduce yourself.

If you can’t make Chicago in May, how about Toronto in June, New York in September, or San Francisco in November?

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!