Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

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

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.

I arrived in beautiful Chicago today for the Storage Decisions show at the Hilton here.  What a great event this is - loads of interested and committed storage users and some of the best minds in the business get together to talk about how we all do this thing we call storage!

I was glad to see Jon Toigo here - while I may not always agree with him, he certainly has vast experience in the storage industry.  And I appreciate his role as the iconoclast of storage.  We both agree that the real action in the industry happens at a whole different layer than just storing and moving bits.

Before sitting down with Jon, I was pleased to chat with my good friends, Curtis Preston and Bill Peldzus, both of whom have, over the years, proved themselves advocates of end user concerns.

I’ll also be looking for Greg Schulz, Mark Staimer, Arun Taneja, and Steve Duplessie and his crew from ESG.  See what I mean about the best minds in the industry?

Of course, the hotel is crawling with TechTarget’s staff, including Rich C and Rich F from Storage magazine, Dave Raffo from SearchStorage.com, and Amy, Lindsey and the folks who run the show.

If you’re here, please do come up and introduce yourself.  If not, there are three more shows scheduled for this year!

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!

TechTarget’s Storage Decisions shows have long been a highlight of the data storage industry calendar, and the company recently announced the dates for 2008. I’m pleased to announce that I will again be presenting at these shows, and will post more details on my topics as they become available.

Storage Decisions 2008 dates and locations:

• Chicago, May 13-15
• Toronto, June 5-6
• New York, September 23-25
• San Francisco, November 4-6

The format is being tweaked this year (as has the editorial direction of Storage Magazine) to include more in-depth technical content, and I’m sure the show will remain excellent. If you haven’t been, you’ve missed out - there are no product vendors on stage or even in the sessions, so it’s very focused on real-world users of storage technologies, and the sessions have always been top notch!

TechTarget’s Storage magazine today announced the winners of their annual Products of the Year awards, and it’s an impressive array of technologies. Although I did not contribute to the voting this year, I heartily endorse the outcomes!

Overall, I was impressed with many of these products this last year, but certainly CommVault, HDS, ProStor, Xsigo, and Akorri (winners all) stood out with important products. I too was surprised to see the absence of some heavyweights: Symantec’s strength in archiving and backup didn’t net them an award, and both Emulex and QLogic were skipped for the 8 Gb FC market. EMC was overlooked, too, but I’m certain that will be remedied for 2008 after the flurry of excellent new products announced these last few months.

Backup Software

• Winners: CommVault’s Simpana 7.0 - an impressive product that brings a very wide range of data protection features in an integrated package. They’d be in my top three! Next was the intriguing RecoverGuard from Continuity Software, a product which intrigues me. Finally, Yosemite’s amazingly priced FileKeeper Professional took bronze - I definitely would have put this up there, too!
• Strong contenders: EVault’s solution would have been my pick since it effectively tackles a real need - mobile and SMB data protection! Also, Symantec’s strong NetBackup 6.5 upgrade deserved more attention.

Backup Hardware

• Winners: NEC’s HydraStor HS8 isn’t a platform I’m familiar with - I’ll have to take the judges at their word! But I can’t argue with silver and bronze winners, Copan and ProStor’s cool RDX - both are truly revolutionary products and deserve the spotlight.
• Strong contenders: I would definitely have added Gresham’s Clareti VTL to the list - it’s much more than “just a VTL” and I hope it gets some more attention!

Disk and Disk Subsystems

• Winners: Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 deserves considerable attention, bringing built-in hardware encryption to the mobile data market - every mobile disk should have this technology! NetApp’s FAS2000 (silver) is nice enough, but I was much more impressed with the bronze-winning USP V from HDS this year.
• Strong contenders: I would have given the USP V the top prize for 2007, but I can’t argue with the little Seagate disk. The AMCC 3ware 9600 RAID adapter deserves some attention, too.

Storage Management Software

• Winners: Akorri’s BalancePoint (gold) impresses me much like bronze-winning Onaro’s Application Insight does. Both make the big leap from “storage” to “application data”, and both are worthy winners. I’ve never used the silver-winning Finisar NetWisdom product, but it looks like others are impressed with it.
• Strong contenders: This was a crowded field, and Symantec, WysDM, Quantum StorNext, and the rest probably came close. I agree with the Akorri placing, but would have picked one of these instead of the potentially mis-categorized Finisar product.

Networking Equipment

• Winners: Xsigo took the top honors with their InfiniBand-based VP780 platform. This is truly a next-generation product, and it is getting serious attention and traction, and deserved a spot on the list! Riverbed’s excellent Optimization System (silver) also deserved its ranking, but I’m not familiar enough with the Storwize product to know if it’s truly bronze-worthy.
• Strong contenders: I would have tipped either QLogic or Emulex’s 8 Gb offerings for a spot. Despite my jokes, 8 Gb FC is an important element of the modern SAN and both companies have carved out a compelling product, but apparently neither shipped in volume until this month…

I’ve just started writing an article for Storage Magazine on the topic of large filesystem backup.  It’s always been difficult to handle really big filesystems - whether they contain lots of little files or a few big ones.  There are parallelism issues, latency, throughput/streaming, etc.

If you have experience with this topic, I’d appreciate a comment or email so I can pick your brain!  Whether you’re a vendor or end user, let me know what you think about this topic - maybe you’ll see your name in lights in the April or May issue of Storage Magazine!