Source: http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/03/25/another-storage-analyst-defects-to-a-vendor/

Barry Murphy, formerly of Forrester Research, has been named the new director of product marketing for Mimosa, tasked with “expanding the company’s eDiscovery and content management partner ecosystem and broadening awareness for and adoption of Mimosa Systems’ award-winning content archiving platform.”

The cynically inclined might say he already did a similar thing with his last major act as a Forrester analyst, the publication of two reports on message archiving products. The reports concluded that on-premise software archives (such as Mimosa’s) are gaining more traction and are more mature in their features than hosted archiving offerings.

I don’t really believe this was anything other than coincidence–the research for such a report goes on for months and the report was obviously started well in advance of this transition. It makes sense that an analyst whose expertise was in records management and archiving would go to a vendor in that sector of the market. But sometimes the appearance of a conflict of interest can be as problematic as an actual conflict of interest. At the least, from my perspective, it’s unfortunate timing.

Murphy joins Tony Asaro, who recently resurfaced as chief strategy officer for Virtual Iron after a short stint with Dell, as the most recent storage analysts to head to vendors. It has been suggested to me that most analysts wind up at vendors or doing consulting, so maybe this is a natural lifecycle we’re seeing.

Speaking of defections, it has also been announced that Dr. David Yen has left Sun for Juniper. Yen was formerly the head of Sun’s storage group, who was shifted to their chip group following the restructuring of the storage and server groups under John Fowler last year.

Archiving email is a business necessity in an ever increasing number of organizations. There are several primary reasons for this:

• Legal or other regulation
• Mailbox size management
• Litigation response/Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)

This last reason is what gives many organizations heartburn, and many are attempting to get the “digital landfill” that is their current email archive under control. To most, this takes the form of archive categorization, a method for automatically:

• Setting retention periods for email messages
• Properly marking potentially privileged email
• Categorizing and/or eliminating non-business and duplicate email

The best time to implement some form of categorization is before you are forced to respond to an FRCP request. To facilitate this, the legal department and the information technology groups need to come together. I’m not suggesting that holding hands and singing “Kum Bah Yah” is the solution to your archive headaches, but here is what I’ve seen:

IT: “We need an archive retention strategy.”
Legal: “Yes.”
IT: “We need to come to consensus on what items to keep for what periods.”

At this point the legal group typically answers one of two ways:

Legal: “That’s simple, keep everything forever.”

-or-

Legal: “That’s simple, keep everything for thirty days, and then nuke it.”

While both of these might seem an exaggeration on my part, I assure you it isn’t. Virtually every organization that I’ve worked with has taken one or the other of these naïve approaches at some point. The first time that they had to actually retrieve something from the archive they realized one of two things:

• The archive is so full of cruft that it’s impossible to find anything. We can’t differentiate anything that might be responsive from the non-business email, and we’re spending a lot of money examining these emails to determine whether they are privileged communications.

-or-

• There isn’t much in the archive that matters (and, since you also deleted it from the mailboxes and PST files on the user desktop, your users are up in arms).

Just for reference, it is possible to find an archiving middle ground where companies retain a manageable amount of information while still being responsive to the current and future demands.

For example, some organizations have taken to targeted archiving - only archive the users that might be involved as custodians in the future. For many organizations this represents only a small fraction of the total user base.

Remember that setting retention periods properly based on user role and content is essential to proper archive hygiene, and removing non-business email can cut your archive size by a significant percentage.

Bradley Young is vice president of services for MessageGate, an email controls company (http://www.MessageGate.com). Bradley blogs at http://randomdesiderata.blogspot.com/.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/19/judge-hands-white-house THE WHITE HOUSE was ordered by a federal judge yesterday to show just cause within three days why it should not be required to produce to the court forensic copies of all its data storage media used by any employee between March 2003 and October 2005.

Public interest groups sued to obtain White House emails from that period but the Bush administration claims it “lost” all those emails and can’t recover them.

In 2002 the Bush administration dismantled the Lotus Notes based Automatic Records Management System that the Clinton administration had installed in 1994. Between 2002 and 2004, the White House migrated to an email system based on Microsoft Exchange, according to testimony last month before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by Theresa Payton, CIO for the White House Office of Administration. She testified that the Lotus Notes based email archiving system did not work properly with Microsoft Exchange.

We can almost see Karl Rove slapping his forehead and laughing, “Who knew?”

Consequently, potentially millions of White House emails generated just before and after the start of the Iraq war, as well as during the period when covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover was blown, have been discovered as missing.

The Bush administration has offered varying and conflicting stories about the “lost” White House e-mails. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said last April, “I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost.”

Two citizens watchdog groups, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, are pursuing a federal lawsuit against the administration to force disclosure of the missing e-mails and installation of effective email archiving at the White House.

Yesterday’s ruling by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola gives the White House three days to “show cause in writing … why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a forensic copy of any media that has been used or is being used by any former or current employee who was employed at any time between March 2003 and October 2005.”

A “forensic copy” means an exact duplicate of a physical data storage device.

The White House has until the close of business on this Friday, March 21st to respond to the judge’s order.

With the announcement of Trend Micro entering the archiving world, my biggest question is when and if McAfee will follow.  McAfee, being one of the worlds largest security (antivirus) vendor (after CA and Symantec)  is now the only antivirus vendor left that does NOT have an archiving solution in its portofolio.

Historically there has always been a synergy between archiving, storage vendors and security vendors so it wouldn’t be a surprise if McAfee wouldn’t have interest.     Time will tell.

 Not the two companies you would instantly relate to eachother, but suprisingly one of the things they have in common that they were both sold for approximately the same amount of money to their new owners.

Scary …

I’m not going to discuss the whole reasoning why former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer had to resign, however the archiving industry basically owes its massive growth largely to him. We should all remember Mr. Spitzer’s contribution to the email archiving industry as during his eight year tenure as Attorney General, Mr. Spitzer took on the giants of Wall Street - Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and the New York Stock Exchange in cases involving white collar crime, securities crime and internet fraud. Along the way much was said about the mis-management of email records, resulting in many judicial changes to management of email and all forms of electronic records.

Time will tell if Eliott Spitzer resumes a public career or retires to a more private life, but we owe a debt of gratitude for the man who almost single handedly brought attention to email and other forms of electronic communication and brought about the changes we take for granted today.

To follow up on a previous post, The Death of Store Management. As many archiving vendors claim to help the overal performance of Exchange by stubbing email messages and offering customers the option to reduce the footprint of Exchange databases, the reality is that they actually hurt the Exchange Server performance by doing this.

It comes down to the fact that the performance degradation with having large mailboxes is really related to the number of items in a given folder and not the overall size of the items. As the number of items in a folder approaches around 5000, the size of the 11 default view folders increases to the point where they are no longer retained in the DB cache, which means that they must be generated on the fly each time you view the folder. Microsofts KB database has a good article on this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905803
For online mode clients this means increased IO on the exchange server, while for cached mode clients, it means increased I/O on the client. (when you’re in chached mode the read I/O doesn’t go away, it’s just shifted to the client).

The overall size of the mailbox, combined with what Microsoft recommends as limits on store size, determines how many users you can put on a given store and the overall scalability (scale up) of a given mailbox server. You can always scale out (add more mailbox servers). Larger mailboxes generally mean more mailbox server, more licenses, more storage, bigger backups, and higher costs/user for your messaging environment, however … what I wrote before .. a far better solution (and one that Microsoft would really like you to use) is NOT to stub. Go towards an age based policy where you delete data from Exchange after a set of time as all of your information is already in the archive.

And to give an example … a previous post on PST consolidation describes a bad example as well that will hurt your performance.

After Sunbelt Software with the rebranded version of Exchange@PAM, it is now Trend Micro’s turn with a rebranded version of ….. the Cryoserver appliance software.  I have to say that it isn’t a quick copy and paste, but indeed it is the same version used in the appliance version.  As some of you know Cryoserver ressurected themselves after they went belly up in late 2006 and entered the market again.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/messagegate.html

E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don’t tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.

A company that’s trying to fight that good fight when it comes to e-mail governance is MessageGate.

MessageGate has made a name for itself helping some very large companies govern the chaotic world of e-mail. It has some pretty good bloodlines, too, taking what it learned at Boeing and breaking away to target enterprise customers in 2003. According to marketing chief Chris Bradley, MessageGate is approaching profitability and ramping up its sales and marketing efforts to target more clients like current customers Lehman Brothers and Lockheed.

As enterprises push their processes to eliminate paper and minimize warehouses full of stored documents, the percentage of e-mail that becomes business records is increasing. Some people call this a move toward environmental friendliness or green IT, others see it as an area to gain efficiencies and increase productivity. Either way, large increases in e-mail volume clearly create challenges relative to content management, compliance, and security.

“The cost of compliance is rapidly rising, and ad-hoc efforts to address compliance haven’t really succeeded,” said Bradley.

And apparently some of ECM’s bigger names have figured out it’s easier to partner with companies like MessageGate.

“The ECM vendors can’t take their document management engine and subsume a full-blown e-mail archiving solution,” added Bradley.

“The ECM angle for us is an interesting dynamic. We’re working with several of the large ECM providers to help their customers get on a better footing when it comes to how they view and manage their e-mail infrastructure. EMC (NYSE: EMC), in particular, has its own formidable e-mail archiving solution, but they still also work with our platform,” noted Bradley.

Risk management is obviously critical for all enterprise customers, and it still surprises me that e-mail governance is sometimes viewed as content management’s stepchild.

“Rather than keep your head in the sand,” concluded Bradley, “companies need to start applying policies and prepare for the inevitable.”

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/03/10/229785/confidence-ebbs-in-email-archiving.htm

A survey by AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Association, has found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of UK respondents have little or no confidence that their firms’ emails related to commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and recoverable.

This figure represents a continuing decline in confidence in email traceability: in the same survey in 2007, 56% expressed their lack of confidence. In general public sector organizations, the lack of confidence rose to over 70%.

AIIM ventured the opinion that the research also reflected a general lack of control over all non-paper records, with 51% not confident that their electronic information is accurate, accessible and trustworthy, a rise of 7% compared to twelve months earlier.  When asked, “If your organisation was sued by a former customer or citizen, how long would it take to produce all of the information related to that person?”, just  over a quarter of respondents (27%) cited more than one month.

The results are indicative that investment in document and email management systems is failing to keep pace with the email deluge explained Doug Miles, AIIM’s UK Managing Director. He commented, “It also suggests that recent high profile cases may have alerted organizations to their potential vulnerabilities. For larger organizations, savings in legal discovery costs alone could justify an ECM investment.”

AIIM hopes to address these issues at its 2008 AIIM Roadshow,  which visits Glasgow, Bolton, Coventry, Bristol and London from 28 April to 2 May. This year’s educational theme is “Piecing together the Information Puzzle” and industry experts will deliver information and advice throughout the week.