Archiving101.com

It are the quiet weeks in the archiving space which allows me to get some other work done.  Most vendors are holding their breath to see what the 2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant is going to deliver. This report is scheduled to be released in the May timeframe and companies will be made and broken by this report and its content is always highly contested.  My personal expectations are though that most vendors are holding out also for the upcoming tech conferences like Legal Tech, Teched, IT Forum and more to announce availability of their newest releases.  Generally this is done halfway through the year to help sales cycles.

I’ll be following the AXS One first quarter financial results  which are going to be announced tomorrow.

Barry Murphy has decided to join us all in the blogosphere.  You can read his blog at http://barrymurphy.mimosasystems.com/

I really was only a matter of time that Oracle decided to enter the archiving arena to get a slice of the pie, as it allows them to push their own database technology.  However … I would like to know what is up with that insanely high per processor pricing ?

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http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2008_apr/universalonlinearchive.html

Oracle Expands Enterprise Content Management Portfolio with Launch of Oracle® Universal Online Archive Oracle E-mail Archive Service, a Scalable and Hot-Pluggable E-mail Archiving Interface, also Unveiled

COLLABORATE 2008, DENVER, CO.   14-APR-2008 05:00 AM

• Oracle continues to expand its enterprise content management offering with the launch of Oracle Universal Online Archive and Oracle E-mail Archive Service, components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.
• Oracle Universal Online Archive provides a highly scalable and manageable archiving system that combines the proven infrastructure of the Oracle Database and the standards-based, hot-pluggability of Oracle Fusion Middleware with a high-volume data ingestion engine to simplify archiving, management and rapid retrieval of multiple content types.
• Oracle E-mail Archive Service, in conjunction with Oracle Universal Online Archive, provides an optimized e-mail archiving interface for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes, and SMTP-based mail systems.
• Oracle Universal Online Archive and Oracle E-mail Archive Service help enterprises decrease storage and IT operations costs, improve e-mail performance and security, and reduce the cost and risk associated with e-discovery and litigation preparation.

Supporting Quote

• “Oracle has decades of experience in managing huge volumes of data efficiently and securely. Oracle Universal Online Archive takes that deep understanding and brings it to bear on actively archiving multiple types of unstructured content and particularly e-mail. The result is a uniquely flexible archiving platform that helps lower IT costs, simplify the integration of security and records management policies into the archiving process, and improve end user access to current and archived information.” said Frank Radichel, vice president, Software Development, Oracle.

Pricing and Availability

• Oracle Universal Online Archive is expected to be available in 2008. The expected price is $20 per named user plus or $75,000 per CPU.
• Oracle E-mail Archive Service is expected to be available in 2008. The expected price is $50 per named user plus or $40,000 per CPU.

I haven’t been able to blog much recently due to work duties and travel.  I didn’t miss the announcement from C2C though last week about the adoption of the OpenSearch standard.  Opensearch is a collection of formats that allow for sharing search result sets.  I really applaud the industry for slowly adopting standards, after customers will run a dispersed enterprise when it it comes down to content for a long time.

Besides OpenSearch the slow adoption of the EDRM XML standard again is a good step.  This industry needs some standards if it wants to see better adoption and continue to see growth.   What protocols / standards would you like to see the archiving/compliance/eDiscovery industry to adopt?

I’m glad to hear that Microsoft is taking a hard stance against stubbing/shortcutting of data within a mailbox.  The obvious performance problems it causes are starting to hit home.  Not only it is the end user performance that is affected by stubbing, it also can have a significant impact on larger environments leveraging Standby Cluster Replication.   The problem lies in the fact that if a message is replaced with a shortcut, the original message is deleted and replaced with a stub.  This stub actually generates a transaction in the transaction log.  So when you leverage SCR these transaction logs will have to be shipped to your remote site and while you are trying to reduce the volume of information it actually increases the volume of transaction data that you will have to ship over your WAN.

I’m glad to see in at least a few presentations Microsoft customers recommending AGAINST stubbing.  Applause!!

I’ll be at Interact 2008 in San Diego this week, hosting the bird on a feather round table on Compliance so unfortunately I won’t be able to post much.