Storage Magazine has returned with an online edition

Although the dead-tree version of TechTarget’s excellent Storage Magazine is no more, the company today released the premiere issue of its online counterpart! Available as both a web-based magazine and a PDF download, Storage Magazine Online continues with many of the same editors and writers, including Rich Castagna at the helm.

You can still subscribe to the online edition too, so you needn’t miss an issue! Existing qualified subscribers should receive an email today outlining the shift from paper to bits.

One article I’d personally like to highlight is my own piece on consolidated archiving. I put a great deal of effort into the article, and I welcome your comments!

I wish the TechTarget all the best with this transition, and urge you all to check out their work. Now if they would only add all of the back issues as downloadable PDFs as well!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Introducing Storage Magazine Online!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Register online at Contoural’s web site!

E-mail Archiving 101: A Non-Technical Person’s Overview of How E-mail Archiving Works and How to Pick the Right Tool
Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Faculty: Independent expert Stephen Foskett, Principal Consultant, Contoural, Inc.

E-mail archiving systems are becoming an important component of many organization document retention and litigation preparedness strategy. Nevertheless, to the non-technical person, understanding what these systems do and how they are different can be bewildering or even downright confusing. A good idea sometimes gets lost in technical translation. In this webinar, industry expert and independent Contoural Principal Consultant Stephen Foskett will walk through a high-level overview of how these systems work in simple terms aimed at the non-technical person.

Topics include:

• What do e-mail archiving products do and how do they support litigation readiness?
• High-level description of how different products work and are used
• What are some of the real differences between systems?
• How to evaluate which features are best for your organization

This webinar will also provide time for questions from the audience.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Email Archiving 101 Webinar, January 8
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

If you’re attending the conference, here’s my schedule:

• Monday, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM: DATA RETENTION & RETRIEVAL track: Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Products
• Monday, 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM: Exhibit Hall Reception
• Monday, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM: Ask the Experts in the Exhibit Hall
• Monday, 7:30 PM – Late: Dinner (You’re invited! See below!)
• Tuesday, 1:00 PM – 2:45 PM: Lunch in the Exhibit Hall
• Tuesday, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM: STORAGE & CAPACITY MANAGEMENT track: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Virtualization – In One Hour!

Join Me For Dinner on Monday!

A bunch of storage folks have said they’re interested in getting together for a dinner on Monday night. Let’s do it!

• What: Dinner and conversation
• When: 7:30 PM on Monday the 17th until we get tired
• Where: Start at the San Francisco Hilton, then off for Sushi, Mexican, or Italian (help me decide!)
• Who: Anyone who wants to come along!
• How: Contact me through email, a comment on this page, or twitter!

See you in San Francisco!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Making Plans for Storage Decision San Francisco
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The gist is that email archiving can be an incredibly useful tool to manage legal risks and enable more effective discovery of message content. Electronic discovery is growing at an amazing clip, and most cases now include email messages – in fact, email is estimated to be 60% to 70% of all legal discovery in the United States today!

At the same time, companies are challenged with ineffective or un-enforced retention and litigation hold policies and rampant “underground archiving” of messages in offline PST files. And to make matters worse, the 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure drastically shortened the amount of time companies have to describe and produce electronic records! It’s simply impossible to begin recovering messages from backup tapes in response to legal requests – the only way forward is a proactive strategy based on email archiving.

If this piques your interest, grab a copy of that whitepaper, join me on Wednesday for the webinar, and check out some of my other email-related content. I’ll also be speaking on the topic at Storage Decisions in San Francisco, and would be happy to respond to your emailed questions any time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Six Critical Steps For Managing Email E-Discovery
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

You can find my presentations here:

• Deep Dive into Email Archiving Products: 11 Essential Attributes of Email Archiving Systems
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Virtualization — In One Hour

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Decisions New York 2008 Presentations Now Available
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Webcast: Automating Policy With Email Archiving Technology
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Decisions New York 2008 Feedback
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• How to improve the receptivity of the e-mail archieve message to management to overcome the biases you mentioned? Consider what management is interested in most: They don’t necessarily care about email archiving, but they will respond to well-presented solutions to business objectives like cost avoidance for litigation and e-discovery or future reduced spending on IT infrastructure (storage).
• How do you get things moving when Legal is sponsor and can demonstrate that one lawsuit discovery failure will be the same cost as the project? This would be an ideal scenereo. Legal probably already understands the high cost of e-discovery and potential risk of adverse judgement. Now demonstrate the ways that email archiving can help. But be realistic – an email archiving app will help with e-discovery, but is definitely not a complete solution. You will still need policy and process for hold and discovery, and may even need additional e-discovery tools.
• Have you seen standard or default retention periods for email, and how are they determined? I would not want to suggest standard or “rule of thumb” retention periods. In my experience with many organizations, I have seen such a wide variety of carefully considered retention schedules that I have come to believe that there is no such thing as a standard. However, I would like to suggest not making a too-short maximum (say, less than three months) or else you will drive end users to underground archiving to get around the policy. Such a short retention period can work for certain classes of messages (company picnic, lunch invites, mass mailings), but I can’t imagine a business where no one would need to keep messages longer. Try to be realistic in setting your retention, balancing productivity with compliance. Setting retention periods is an exercise in consensus building, with representatives from IT, Legal, HR, Compliance, and others each contributing their own needs. It’s doable, though – I do it for a living!
• How many years back do people hold on to mail typically? Most organizations lack standards or policies for retention, so their typical retention varies based on employee actions. When they do have retention policies for email, they tend to classify messages (by organization or user, keywords, or through user action) into a few “buckets” with appropriate retention for each. Most have short retention (3 to 9 months) for some content, and longer retention (on the order of a few years) for other types. Most also have a “keep forever” category for special record types.
• Do you have an opinion on whether journaling is better or not for meeting legal requirements? Most legal groups desire the most complete set of messages possible. Both journaling and log shipping should meet this need.
• Have you seen much use for email archiving for supporting Audit to prove that an event was reviewed and approved? Many organizations use email as part of their workflow. In these cases, maintaining a complete set of messages is critical for audit and compliance. Many certainly do use email archives for this purpose, while others prefer to route such approvals to other content management systems to maintain these records.
• Is there a legal argument to be made that getting rid of pst files and having a central archive will help with privacy law issues? Decentralized personal archives like PST files are a privacy nightmare waiting to happen – they are highly mobile, can be copied and viewed easily, and tend to “live” on theft-prone devices like laptops and portable drives. Replacing PST files with a centralized archive has many many benefits, and the reduced risk of privacy breaches is certainly among these. However, most mail clients still maintain offline caches of mail server (and archive) data, so simply replacing PST with an archive will not elimate the privacy risk.
• You might want to mention that accelerating volumes of stored email are not necessarily bad because it is electronic and therefore searchable. Offline stuff dumped into file servers with no meta data is actually more of a nightmare because no one knows who created it or why it is needed (or not). Adding structure to electronic stored information is always valuable, and email archives certainly do make that data much more organized and searchable, along with enabling retention policies to be applied (assuming they exist!) Unstructured data on file servers is indeed a nightmare, and can pose a serious risk. There are other tools to tackle this type of data, however, and they might do a better job than relying on an email archive as a primary repository of critical records.
• Can you elaborate on user training needs? I was under the impression that changes to the end user were minimal. The amount of impact an email archiving system has on end users can vary from minimal to significant, based mostly on how much user interaction is desired for classification. However, even the most unobtrusive system is likely to change certain aspects of user behavior, from PST files to searches to stubbing and deletion of messages. Therefore, training is probably needed with every email archiving implementation.
• Litigation holds can last for YEARS !! Tape is DEAD especially to try to rebuild mail boxes. Tape remains non-dead for certain applications like backup, despite years of prognostication. However, you are correct that e-discovery of data on tape is incredibly difficult and time-consuming for most systems. There are tools to help, but an online archive is vastly more flexible and speedy than recovering backup data from tape. I’ve seen backup-sourced e-discovery costs rise into the millions of dollars, too!
• How important is classification in an archive solution? The importance of classification depends on the business objectives that an archive is meant to serve. However, most implementations will require at least some message classification mechanism in order to determine how long different messages should be retained, since a one-size-fits-all retention schedule is unlikely to meet anyone’s needs. Therefore, it is important to begin developing an overall record retention policy for email when implementing an email archive, and to consider how messages will be classified. Classification of email messages is a complicated topic – worthy of its own webinar at least!
• We are a globally dispersed organization which increases the complexity and cost. Do you feel implementation is an all or nothing scenario or does it make sense to focus on domestic and large campuses and then in a second phase chase funding for remote and international sites? Dispersed organizations face many unique technical challenges, especially when implementing email archiving. Certainly it is better to have some archiving than none at all, but unless your retention requirements are also segmented by geography, focusing on only a single location can be risky. I’d definitely suggest starting with the biggest fish, but you will probably have to get to everyone fairly soon afterward.
• Are there solution that do both email and file data (shared folders) archiving? Yes, some email archiving products also do file archiving. However, some choose to implement these functions separately to keep one from standing in the way of the other – it’s more important to have some archiving than to wait and wait for a complete solution.
• Not to mention, extremely short retention periods for email messages will NOT allow an enterprise to comply with litigation hold needs… Once a litigation hold is ordered, all retention schedules for covered data must be suspended. Therefore, a short retention schedule does not necessarily preclude compliance with a legal hold order. However, unreasonably short retention will not look good in court!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Answering Your Email Archiving Questions
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Decisions New York is Right Around the Corner
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Trying To Get An Email Archiving Project Approved?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.