Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

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.

Although it’s been available for a while now, Windows Server 2008’s storage changes aren’t widely reported. TechTarget’s Dave Raffo wrote a piece about it today, Windows Server 2008’s hidden storage features, including some quotes from me, but it’s still less than clear.

So let me sum up:

1. Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is probably the biggest news.  Microsoft re-worked this protocol for Vista and 2008 to reduce chattiness, combine multiple commands in a single packet, and allow larger packets.  This should improve performance for just about everyone, but is only in those two operating systems right now.
2. The excellent multi-path I/O (MPIO) driver from Microsoft is also included right out of the box, including device-specific modules for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel.  This is the first version of Windows to come with MPIO, though it’s available with the iSCSI initiator and OEM drivers for other versions.
3. As in Vista, Server 2008 allows you to shrink NTFS filesystems on the fly.  It’s not quite as flexible or forgiving as some third-party tools, but it’s certainly easy to use!  Just go into the disk administrator snap-in and try it for yourself.
4. Windows finally has the option to leave new LUNs alone instead of trying to mount them.  This was one of those things that gave Windows a rep as a bad neighbor in SAN environments.
5. NTBackup is gone, replaced by a new Server Backup MMC snap-in.  I haven’t tried it, but I hope it’s better than the one that comes in Vista!  I ended up keeping NTBackup around on my laptop…
6. A new MMC snap-in called Storage Explorer lets you manage WMI-compliant SAN devices.
7. The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and DFS interfaces are improved and are now scriptable.
8. Server 2008 now automatically aligns filesystem boundaries with storage, which was one of those dark and secret skills us storage guys used to share amongst ourselves.  This can increase performance in high-I/O environments.
9. NTFS (in both Server 2008 and Vista) now has symbolic link support, just like UNIX and Mac OS X.  Note that this got mangled in the TechTarget article.
10. NTFS was also tuned and tweaked a bit for better stability and crash recovery.

Interested in e-discovery? Read my new article on SearchSecurity.com, titled Easing e-discovery preparation by mapping enterprise data.

“Most information security pros have a handle on the major data types found in their environments, but they also know that there is a whole lot more data lurking around the edges. These unknown data types can include documents used by individuals, or whole applications owned by departments that have quietly become essential to the business.

Most of the time, focusing on the squeaky wheels is an acceptable strategy; if there’s no “squeak” then there’s no need to worry. But when it comes to litigation, and especially managing the electronic discovery process, what you don’t know can hurt you.”

Real Video: Where the SAN Stands

Curious about the current state of SAN technology?  Stephen Bigelow of TechTarget interviewed me (last summer) about SAN options, and the video is now live on their BitPipe site.

Topics covered include combined iSCSI and FC SANs, ups and downs of modular storage and oversubscribed switches, next-generation SAN management applications, storage virtualization, and best practices for SAN design.

Here’s a snip - the three best practices for SAN design are as follows:

1. Choose reliable high-quality hardware
2. Build dual redundant networks
3. Protect management interfaces

Watch the whole video (it’s 17 minutes long) and let me know what you think!

I just got an email from Microsoft - they’ve given me the MVP award for the area of File System Storage!  Great news - so how do I feel?  Not quite as good as the “Steve” in this video, but pretty good…

So what does this mean?  Am I now a shill, beholden forever to Redmond?  Should I return the Mac? Hardly!

In fact, the program materials all stress that, since we were nominated for what we did in the past, we should go right on doing just what we were doing.  For me, this means remaining non-partisan in the storage wars - I’m on the side of what works and delivers results, not what one vendor or the other decides is best.  Microsoft has done some really great things in the storage arena, and has given much of it away for free, and that’s the simple truth.  If they change their stance, expect me to call them on it, MVP or not.

I believe in maintaining the best possible relationship with everyone in the business, from vendors to analysts, so I can make great things happen for my clients, the end users of technologies.  This award gives me exceptional access to Microsoft resources, and I intend to call on them when my clients need help.  Simply put, being a Microsoft MVP means I can step up the level of service I can deliver.

Only one thing bugs me about this: The name.  Seriously, “MVP”?  I’m not A-Rod!  And “File System Storage”?  I guess they had to tie the award to some product area, so “storage technologies” or “enterprise storage” wouldn’t have worked.  So, yeah baby, I hit home runs with NTFS!

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?

Even though storage virtualization technologies have been on the market for 20 years or more, and numerous companies have tried to sell it as a product in its own right for at least half that long, many are still unsure of what to do with the technology.  A great new piece by Dave Raffo, News Director at SearchStorage.com, discusses the wide variety of virtualization solutions and the real impact they can have.

Dave called me for this piece, and I was pleased with the question.  Truth be told, there really are compelling benefits from virtualization, but most folks have been waiting for a real “must have” killer application for the technology.  In order for this tech to make the impact it should, we in the industry have to change some of our thinking:

• Storage virtualization means more than just Fibre Channel block aggregation.  There are great applications inside servers and arrays and in the NAS world, too.
• Speaking of NAS, Microsoft DFS is probably the most-implemented storage virtualization product, and just about every NAS array has cool aggregation and migration features.
• Virtualization is a feature, not a product.  HDS has seen the amazing potential for block virtualization in migration and storage flexibility, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Storage and server virtualization go well together - so well, in fact, that ESG reports that 24% of those who have implemented the latter are also using the former!

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.