Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

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…

One of the key questions asked of me in my current position at Contoural is this one: How long should we (the client company)  save our email messages?  Not surprisingly, I encounter a wide variety of answers to this question - Legal and IT usually wants a short retention time, while end users seem to want to keep everything forever.

The answer to this question can vary greatly based on conditions, but it is always a solvable problem.  Email is a unique application, and is especially interesting when it comes to litigation and e-discovery, so creating a corporate policy for retention, and implementing it, is critical.  The quandry often boils down to a simple question: Is the email system a repository of business records or a temporal system for communication?  You would never implement a policy for retaining cardboard boxes or manilla folders, because you never know whether it contains an important memo (or a MacBook Air!)  But email could be considered the same way - it’s a mechanism not a data type!

Another key point is that IT often feels that it cannot unilaterally implement a retention policy without outside involvement.  This is true, to a point, but IT had better start the discussion, or they’ll be asked to implement an unreasonable (or technologically unfeasible) policy sooner or later.  Strange as it may sound, a policy that reflects the functionality of email archiving systems might be a good place to start, since this is all you can really implement anyway!

This topic is discussed in far more detail in my new whitepaper (sponsored by Symantec), How Long Should Email Be Saved? Download a copy from their web site to see more information about what a retention policy looks like, the impact of various laws and regulations, and how to get a retention project off the ground!

As I mentioned before, and again, I’ve been working with a team at Contoural on an e-Book for TechTarget on the topic of email archiving. Chapter 6, focused on running an RFP, was just published. This is sponsored by Symantec.  Go grab a copy for yourself!

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working with a team at Contoural on an e-Book for TechTarget on the topic of email archiving. Chapter 5, which focuses on product selection, was just published. Go grab a copy for yourself!

I’ve been working with a team at Contoural on an e-Book for TechTarget on the topic of email archiving, sponsored by Symantec. Now that four chapters are posted, I thought I would mention it. I’ve written two more chapters, which will probably be posted in the coming months, and will be working on more after that as well. I believe you have to register for TechTarget’s Bitpipe in order to download them, but once you do you can access lots of other great material there.

So, without further ado, the e-Book:

1. Email-archiving project roadmap (by Kathryn Hilton and me)
2. Defining an email-archiving policy (by Kathryn and Marion Weiler)
3. Choosing product features for compliance and risk reduction (by Kathryn and Marion)
4. Improve storage management and user productivity with archiving (by Kathryn and Marion)

Look for future chapters (by me) on selecting a product and vendor and running an RFP process.

Symantec announced availability of the latest NetBackup revision today, version 6.5. This release is nearly complete in its buzzword-compliance, with enhanced support for VTL and backup to disk, data deduplication, CDP, LAN-free backup, SharePoint and Exchange, and even VMware! What’s the matter, Symantec, was Thin Provisioning not ready for release? How about green computing? Holographic storage? Yes, I jest…

Seriously, you gotta cheer when a “big gorilla” app like NetBackup adds this kind of technology, though. CDP and deduplication were great ideas but needed n application to focus them, and data backup is an excellent place to apply them.

And although the press release doesn’t highlight it, the application-specific recovery enhancements look especially tasty to me. NetBackup leverages VCB in VMware but can do file-level restore, which is awesome. And it can also do document-level or full-database restore in SharePoint from the same image. Over in Exchange land, it claims to be able to restore from snapshots instead of the backup image, speeding (all too frequent) recoveries.

EMC floated 10% of VMware today as an IPO (NYSE:VMW) and wow, is it taking off. Starting at $29, it’s at $51 after a couple of hours of trading, making EMC’s $635 million investment in 2003 worth $19 billion today. If this price is maintained (which I doubt it will be), VMware would be half as valuable as EMC itself, according to the market. It also has a market cap higher than some other enterprise names you might have heard of: Network Appliance, Sun, Seagate, Symantec, CA…

So Symantec’s CommandCentral version 5.0 includes VMware-integrated SRM.  Thank god!  Has anyone out there been banging their head against the wall trying to figure out what’s taking up all their unstructured filesystem space?  Well trying to get that information in a world of VMware virtual servers is like drilling through your forehead with an auger.  Well, maybe not that painful, but just about…

I guess the razor wire only went one way, eh Storagezilla?  Now if only every other storage management product was VM-savvy…

Update: Looks like EMC announced VMware compatability in ControlCenter 6.0 back in May.  I’d love to learn more about just how well these two products work in the real world.  Anyone using them?

XenSource just announced that they’ll embed Symantec-née-Veritas‘ server-side storage virtualization software into their server virtualization offering. This is great news, since server virtualization has boiling for more than a year now with precious little storage integration to be seen. Although XenSource is a distant second in the world of server virtualization, they’re close enough to put heat on leader, VMware. And every time an upstart prompts the market leader to innovate, I’m cheering. Plus, I’ve been a fan of VxVM for decades.

I for one was surprised at the small impact EMC has had on VMware. One systems administrator I talked to enthusiastically pointed out how great it was that big bad old EMC didn’t ruin VMware, but it cuts both ways. EMC has tremendous knowledge of the realities of managing storage in the enterprise, yet this hasn’t much rubbed off on VMware. After all, last I heard, they were still telling users to provision a single LUN for multiple virtual servers, and mixing OS and application data on the virtual C: drive…

Maybe we’ll see a response from EMC. EMC added volume management to PowerPath 4.0 back in 2003, and rumor had it they were developing their own full-featured multi-platform alternative to Veritas Volume Manager/Foundation Suite. Could this be headed into the VMware codebase? That would be a great way to gain some traction outside the storage space!

Yes, folks, China is rising in storage industry. A while back, my good friend Marc Staimer suggested that Huawei might become the next great storage vendor. Well, Huawei’s joint venture with 3Com has now become 3Com’s unit in China, H3C. That’s right, Bob Metcalfe’s old company bought Huawei out of the venture this year in an attempt to regain the number two market position in networking. And since H3C has long had a strong interest in the storage side of the network, we might see 3Com attack the low end of the storage industry next year!

H3C already has a long list of products, most based on in-house hardware and OEM software. On the storage side, the company makes an iSCSI storage array platform dubbed “Neocean”. This storage platform, selling strongly in China, is alleged to leverage technology licensed from FalconStor (on the low-end IX1000), Intransa (on the bigger IX5000), as well as iVivity and Xyratex. OEM storage developer Ciprico today announced that it will be working with H3C on the next generation. H3C also sells a WAFS accelerator leveraging Expand Networks software. All of these should be coming to the United States next year.

Huawei itself is also getting back into the storage market in the form of a joint venture with Symantec, creatively called Huawei-Symantec. This company is set to be coming out with a line of network devices with Veritas-based software built in. We’re hearing about virus scanning and content indexing appliances, as well as NAS and SAN arrays which will include storage foundation software from Symantec right out of the box.

Who knows what’s next from Huawei? I’d guess expanded services, more resellers in the West, and more OEM deals to create bigger systems. In a few years, they might give Hitachi and EMC trouble in the enterprise market, especially when big server vendors like Sun, SGI, Dell, and HP start rethinking their OEM strategies…