Yesterday I completed my quick road trip to Chicago to attend TechTarget's annual spring Storage Decisions conference returning home last night. Here are some the highlights from my day 2.

I started out the day with an hour-long briefing with Xiotech's CTO Stephen J Sicola and Storage Architect Peter Selin. Xiotech has been talking up a storm about the ground-shaking importance of its new Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) ever since Xiotech announced it at Storage Networking World about a month ago. However Xiotech and I have not had a chance to connect for me to take a close look at its architecture so Stephen and Peter spent some time talking me through it.

One of the factoids I found most intriguing was the history (at least as Steve tells it) why Xiotech (and Seagate behind the scenes) felt obligated to go back to the basics in designing the ISE that underlies its new Emprise stroage system. One of the more interesting aspects to the story was the history of placing disk drives into storage systems. Apparently when disk drives were first placed into storage systems, they were not designed them for vertical insertion - always horizontal. So when disk drives were placed vertically in storage systems to optimize rack space, they started failing more frequently.

Another key problem had to do with mounting and cooling the disk drives. Again, disk drives were designed for mounting in stable (non-vibrating) racks as standalone units with ample air flow for cooling. However, when putting tens or hundreds of disk drives into a rack, not only is air flow around the disk drives reduced, but the vibration of all of these spinning disk drives in the same rack is amplified leading to higher disk drive failure rates. So the disk storage systems have compensated over the years by making tweaks in their firmware and controllers to offset these variances and minimize the impact of failures.

Xiotech's Sicola felt it was time to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the design of everything from the disk drive firmware to how they were mounted in storage systems to the controllers managing them. He started this process nearly 6 years and the result is the ISE found in Xiotech's Emprise storage systems. Key changes it makes are more stable mounts for disk drive placement and replacing the disk drive's native firmware with its own firmware for more pro-active monitoring and the transmission of storage system reports to Xiotech.

Though there were many others, sending the activity reports to Xiotech caught my attention because Xiotech will now monitor activity on your systems and notify companies not just when drives fail, but warn them when it detects abnormal activity on their Emprise system that may contribute to degraded application performance. For instance, if a company places a high performance Oracle database on SATA disk drives, the reports sent back to Xiotech should detect this activity and Xiotech should in turn warn the company that not only should its Oracle database not reside on SATA disk drives, but that this level of activity could lead to degraded performance and SATA disk drives on the system failing prematurely.

So what do all these new features mean for users short and long term? Because Xiotech makes the Emprise more resilient, they have extended the warranties on their systems from 3 to 5 years while its upfront costs are comparable to other systems. This should allow companies to depreciate these systems out over five years rather than three. This can lower quarterly depreciation costs and, since the underlying disk drives are theoritically more reliable, there is a lower chance of disk drives failing and hence less risk to your applications.

The main question companies need to ask themselves about Emprise is not about its stability and reliability but did Xiotech over-engineer this system? Five years is a long time in the technology industry and can span as much as three generations of technology improvements (assuming new technology is introduced every 18 months). This can leave a company with book value on a 3 year old storage system should a need to upgrade it to more current technology. This could require the company taking a financial hit on the books even though the Emprise is still a viable storage system. Overall, though, Xiotech's Emprise should give companies pause about their current vendor's storage system and think more deeply about how their current storage systems are archtitected and if going from a 3 to a 5 year warrantly makes sense.

My next meeting was with Omneon's Director of Storage Marketing, Dave Frederick. Omneon is a 10-year old, $120 million storage company primarily dedicated to providing storage for the broadcasting industry so I inquired of Dave why his company's sudden interest in attending Storage Decisions. He said that more Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies are now broadcasting video internally  and this is creating a new demand for storage systems specifically designed for the broadcasting industry.

So I queried Dave further to understand further how high transaction environments differ from broadcasting since both call for near 100% availability. Dave explained that there are two fundamental differences between broadcasting and high transaction environments. Broadcasting accesses data sequentially while high transaction environments tend to access data randomly. However, the larger difference is that if there are pauses in high transaction environments (even milliseconds), the transaction can be resent. This is not so in broadcasting. It even one frame is missed (30 frames are sent every second), you don't get a second chance and those types of misses (called black spaces) result in missed SLAs and loss of revenue for broadcasting companies.

It is in this way that Omneon's MediaDeck Integrated Media Server storage differentiates itself from competitive products. Though it uses a grid storage architecture, it also includes an out of band component that verifies each frame as it is encoded and decoded so that when a broadcast is sent out, it streams the video without a black spaces.

Finally, my other notable meeting for the day was lunch with representatives from the LTO consortium: Quantum's Product Marketing Manager, Tom Hammond; IBM's Senior Program Manager, Bruce Master; and HP's Product Marketing Manager, Rick Sellers. Most of our conversation focused around how the use of tape is changing in environments and that while disk is becoming the primary target for backup, companies still need to exercise some caution about using disk exclusively for backup. All of us were aware of recent examples where companies had both their primary, secondary and, in one case, even a tertiary DR site affected by disasters that required the use of portable media in order to recover their environment at still another site.

This week I was back on the road again for a short trip to Chicago (short for me anyway since I am from Omaha) to attend the annual spring Storage Decisions conference put on by TechTarget.

Despite some of the rumors that were floating around that user attendance was down and not as many vendors were in attendance, I did not necessarily find that the case. I ran into Lindsay Mullen, TechTarget's event coordinator, in the exhibit hall. She said that about 550 end-users had registered for the event and that she still expected another small influx of end-users on Wednesday. Also, in talking to other analysts and TechTarget editors who were in attendance, they said that all of the break-out sessions were full. The number of vendors exhibiting did, however, seem to be down from years past but not as much as I anticipated. Off-hand, I am guessing that the number of vendors exhibiting was about two-thirds of past events.

For me, the first day had a decided NEC flair to it. I arrived mid-afternoon on Tuesday and met first with NEC's Karen Dutch. Though I know Karen quite well and she and I speak often, there were a couple of salient points that came out of our briefing. The first was that as she speaks to end-users, she finds that there is a tendency among end-users to lump all disk-based backup products into the virtual tape library (VTL) category. Having been guilty of making that assumption myself in the past, it's easy for me to believe that other end-users are falling into the same trap. However, based upon my observations and trends I am seeing the market, I would venture to say that there is a definite trend away from VTLs and towards using disk-based appliances configured as NAS. Even vendors like Overland Storage who predominantly provide VTLs are examining the possibility of releasing a NAS-based interface.

The other topic that Karen and I discussed at length was the willingness of enterprise users to accept the NEC HYDRAstor's disk-based NAS interface. NEC definitely has the enterprise in mind with the HYDRAstor but I have wondered if enterprises were ready to make the jump from VTL to a disk-based backup appliance configured as NAS. Karen said she had had that concern as well but so far that concern has not born out. Though NEC has a version of the HYDRAstor that is configured as a block-based VTL ready for testing, so far it has not found the need to bring a VTL-based version of the HYDRAstor to market.

Following my briefing with Karen, I stopped by the exhibit hall for a couple of hours to see who was exhibiting and catch up on the latest industry buzz. While grabbing a bite to eat, I ended up sitting with Greg Schulz from Storage I/O, We were sitting across from the HP booth so it naturally followed that we would talk about HP's acquisition of EDS. Having heard about the acquisition on Monday night, I already had a day to mull it over and thought the acquisition made sense. Greg concurred. He felt that HP had a solid insourcing model for those companies who wanted to keep most of their computer management in-house but still needed the more traditional break/fix support that HP current offers. By acquiring EDS, HP now gains access to an outsourcing model for those companies that want to outsource components of their IT infrastructure that are not strategic to their core business. These companies can now turn to HP for both of those functions, something they could not do in the past.

Next up was the evening event that was hosted by NEC (hence the NEC flair to my Day 1 on Storage Decisions). During this event, I was seated next to an end-user from Davenport, IA, and we got to talking about what I saw as the hottest thing in storage right now. I told him that the evolution of data protection software to data management software is probably the most encouraging trend going on. Whenever I speak to users of Asigra Televaulting or the CommVault Simpana Suite, these users are almost universally telling me that they have moved beyond the day-to-day fire drill of troubleshooting backups to focusing on data management and data recovery. That statement obviously struck a chord with this user. He uses Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and he said that he wished he was at that point with backup because he still spends a lot of time struggling with backup and recoveries.

Stay tuned for more insight and info on Storage Decisons Chicago in tomorrow's blog entry.

One thing that struck me was that Compellent (NYSE: CML) users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 - 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers.

Compellent's Data Progression (automated tiered storage) was the virtualization feature that its users spoke most highly about. One user I spoke with over drinks who was from Palm Beach said that he has been using the Data Progression feature for a couple of years. He actually described the experience as "fun" in watching the Compellent Storage Center migrate infrequently accessed blocks of data to lower cost tiers of disk.

Compellent's Dynamic Capacity (thin provisioning) feature was given a lot of attention at the user conference but none of the users I spoke to seemed to be using it - or at least it never came up in conversations that I had with them. It might just be that they assumed I knew they were using it since the Dynamic Capacity feature is part of Compellent's Storage Center core software licensing and, hence, didn't feel obligated to bring it up.

Replication was clearly on the mind of almost every user whether they were presenting at the show or merely talking with me privately. It seems a fair number of its users are taking advantage of Compellent's Storage Center replication functions, Remote Instant Replay (asynchronous replication) and Data Instant Replay (snapshots), in some way even though these software features are add-on licenses to the core software. This trend confirms my suspicions that fast recoveries are becoming more important for companies and the end-users they support.

However not all of the news around replication was positive. Most users had no problems using Compellent to replicate data locally or remotely but when it came to providing consistent recoverable snapshots in conjunction with applications, the news was somewhat mixed. During one user panel, Bill Moss, IT Director for Moss Construction Managers in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, described replicating and recovering Exchange data as a "nightmare". He had to work with Microsoft and come up with a two pages of procedures (some of this content apparently appears on Microsoft's website) to recover public folders within Exchange. In looking around the audience and gauging their reaction, it appeared that Moss's struggles with protecting and recovering Exchange is not unique.

Also at the conference, I had the opportunity to meet with Bruce Kornfeld, Compellent's VP of Marketing, and Larry Aszmann, Compellent's CTO. The main item Bruce and I discussed was how Compellent licenses its software. What distinguishes Compellent from most of its competitors is that it licenses its software by spindle (per disk drive). Its core licensing includes Dynamic Capacity (thin provisioning), LUN security, boot from SAN, some base level reporting features and email home support. This licensing is based on a single controller with one shelf of 16 disk drives. As companies grow their Compellent system, Compellent sells disk drives and licensing in what it terms as "8-packs". Additional software features that users can optionally license with larger systems include its Data Progression, Data Instant Replay, Remote Instant Replay and Fast Track features.

In the brief meeting I had with Compellent's CTO Larry Aszmann just before I exited the conference, I gleaned  two pieces of new information regarding Compellent's  manufacturing process and its commitment to its VARs. In regards to manufacturing, Compellent primarily uses off-the-shelf components in the construction of its systems. This removes from Compellent many of the traditional manufacturing concerns that other storage system providers need to manage.

Aszmann also said that Compellent sells 100% of its products through the channel and has no plans to go direct. He has seen other storage systems vendors do that which has ultimately undermined the relationship with their VARs. Because Compellent does not sell direct, VARs are much more transparent with Compellent about their business dealings since they are less worried about Compellent cutting them out of deals later on. Aszmann says this level of transparency is helping it as a public traded company because it can remain very accurate (about 90% on target) with each quarter's sales forecasts.

Today and tomorrow I am putting on both my reporter and analyst hats. Living in Omaha, NE, I am only a hop, skip and jump away from Minneapolis, MN, so I took the opportunity to drive up here to attend Compellent's annual C-Drive user conference that runs from May 6 - May 8 and do some live, on-site blogging about my experiences while I am here.

Already a few notable items to report from last night's customer reception and this morning's opening presentation.

At the customer reception at Brit's Pub in downtown Minneapolis, I ran into Scott Horst, Compellent's Director of Marketing, and had a chance to chat with him for a bit. He said that about 100 users were registered for the event which represents nearly 10% of their current customer base since Compellent forecasts hitting the 1000 customer mark yet this year.

Also at the customer reception I had the opportunity to meet Sonia St. Charles, the CEO of the Davenport Group, a Minneapolis based VAR. What was noteworthy about this meeting was that she was one of the first VARs if not the first VAR I have met that has embraced Web 2.0 technologies and has redesigned Davenport Group's entire website with a focus on social networking.

She says her 19-year-old son was part of the motivation to push her company to adopt a Web 2.0 format. She finds that the next generation of storage administrators (35 and under) are not accustomed to being called on by sales reps or willing to wait. Instead they are spending a few hours searching the Internet and getting up to speed on technologies so they can make more informed buying decisons. She sees this as key to her company's future in helping her educate and inform current and potential Davenport Group clients.

This morning (May 7) Compellent kicked off the day with a presentation by its CEO Phil Soran and "Green" was a major part of the theme. The first "Green" was the color that Wall Street types like (as in greenbacks). Some highlights that he shared from Compellent's past year included:

• 16% of revenue now comes from international sources even as its income has grown fourfold (last year only 6% came for international sources)
• Did its IPO in October 2007 raising $93.1 million
• 107% year-over-year growth
• 53% of its revenue is coming from repeat orders from existing customers even as its number of new customers has doubled

The more popular notion of "green" also appeared in two of the key trends that Soran sees for storage in the remainder of 2008 which include:

• Virtual data center
• Green, green, green (literally)
• IT and business are more closely aligning

I guess up to this point I have been somewhat skeptical about the whole green initiative and still some skepticism remains. Based on Soran's follow-on comments, companies are going green not because they are having any sudden pangs of guilt about wasting too much power or having a carbon footprint that is too large. Rather, power costs are going through the roof and/or there is a real shortage of power.

Soran mentioned one Compellent customer, the US Capitol Police, that had to virtualize their infrastructrure and go "green" because they couldn't get any more power. They used that as an incentive to virtualize their data center thereby making it more green and now actually have power to spare by more efficiently using their resources.

A question and answer period with the audience then followed and here were some of the responses that Soran and other members of the Compellent executive management team had to the audience's questions.

Q&A

When will TB drives be available? In final qualifications right now and Compellent expects them to be released in the next 6 weeks.

Time line on availability of SAS drives? Been testing SAS for 2 years. The drives are fine but waiting until scalability is there. Currently there are limitations in how many drives can be in a loop. It is a technology Compellent will support but not in the immediate near-term (next 6 months). 

Solid State? Some customers have solid state in their boxes and Compellent supports solid state drives on a case-by-case basis.  There are different kinds of solid state: some are slower than others; others you can only write to a certain number of times. Soran expects them to be adopted first in enterprises with $100 million applications but sees them as problematic to deploy now since customers are still unwilling to ante up for them.

(Side note - I sat in on a customer panel after Soran spoke and there might be some disconnect between Compellent and its customer base on this message. Both of the users on-stage were their highlighted speakers of the C-Drive conference - their pictures are plastered everywhere including Compellent's web site - and both of these presenters indicated they would pursue SSDs if Compellent made them available.)

Encrypted drives? First initiative is to encrypt data stored to removable drives and later to encrypt other drives if demand arose. This is not a 6 week time frame but near future. 

How much of user base has upgraded to 4.0? ~250 customers; performance benefits have been good with those users upgrading from earliers releases to 4.0 reporting substantial performance benefits.

Dedupe? Nothing immediate. Thin provisioning and boot from SAN (one volume for all of your server boots) are technologies that Compellent is using now to address current customer concerns but are trying to figure out most logical fit for this technology. They see archive as the most likely fit for dedupe.

Editor Notes: Edits were made to this blog entry on 5/9/08 at 7:00 am CST to make for better reading and correct some grammatical mistakes.

Note: This blog entry was modified at 6:39 pm CST on 5/1/08 in order to clarify a specific statement. You may contact jerome.wendt@dciginc.com or greg.buckles@dciginc.com for an explanation of what was changed and why.

Joshua Konkle: In your experience, what are the pitfalls that enterprises have yet to encounter when bringing eDiscovery inside their firewall?

Jim Wagner: Depending on the organization's state of eDiscovery acceptance, the pitfalls vary.  For those businesses that have brought eDiscovery behind the firewall, they have already encountered several challenges.  Let these serve as a warning list to newcomers:

• You are in the e-discovery business-- can you offer 24/7 support? 
• How do you handle uptime during network maintenance?
• Can your system and service team accommodate late night productions for tomorrow's court date? 
• Do you have a help desk and/or rapid response system?  Are you able to grant third parties secure, limited access to your internal network, i.e. creating secure network identification to shepherd this process?
• Are you capable of handling broad-based enterprise legal holds and accommodate storage requirements of eDiscovery systems?

For organizations that are involved in behind the firewall eDiscovery systems we expect to see more challenges, such as:

• We've seen several rulings and press related to poor collection practices, but very little coverage of failures by enterprises as full service providers (collection through review and production).  As more and more enterprises assume the role of full service provider, it's likely that we will start to see rulings on this front as well.
• "Behind the firewall" can be inefficient for outside counsel, thus poor service and/or technology selections can result in more hourly fees for the client.
• Patience in choosing technology is required at this juncture in the eDiscovery cycle.  There are some very good choices in terms of existing technologies; however, some of the new technology entrants, with good teams and solid communities, may offer even greater strategic value in terms of higher level analytics and great range of functionality.  Market consolidation is also creating more complex and integrated discovery players.  For an example in this area, consider Iron Mountain's acquisition of Stratify.
• Data leaks and breaches of corporate data - legal data is higher value and a more critical target for privacy breaches.
• Finally, knowing if your team has selected the right application will depend on the ongoing assessment of your legal business process.  Organizations must track their ROI to justify the continued investment in their eDiscovery infrastructure and the team required to manage it.

Joshua Konkle: What is your company's vision for dealing with escalating costs in review datasets for large cases?

Jim Wagner: Management of the eDiscovery review process is our core service offering and it is why we started the company--to provide defensible, strategic and cost-effective review to corporate counsel.  Our recommended solution is fixed cost review (with project pricing based upon the number of documents to be reviewed).

This is delivered by marrying efficient resources, high-speed review applications and proactive project and process management.  We also use higher level strategies, such as our Dynamic Data Analysis™ (a blending of statistical, conceptual and legal analysis), to both identify relevant documents as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and to simultaneously reduce the total amount of data required to be reviewed.

Our business model is not based on managing a single case.  We look to work with companies on an ongoing, tactical and strategic basis.  Since we work on multiple cases, our clients' ROI is a based on the savings they can achieve in enhancement of the eDiscovery process over the long term.

Joshua Konkle: One of the most frequently asked questions by CIO's and others worried about the cost of data management is "how long do I have to keep my data, really?"  What do you say when you get asked that question?

Jim Wagner: The legal (but somewhat impractical) issue is pretty straightforward here---what industry you're in will determine the regulatory and legal requirements for you.  Since relatively few industries are subjected to substantial regulatory/legal requirements for preservation, the question of retention of most records is, often, a balance between the benefit of end user access, aka knowledge management, contrasted against the burdens of data retention expense and potential legal production obligations. 


Joshua Konkle: So, in your opinion there is a trade-off triangle made up of "benefit of access, burdens of retention and production obligations?"

Jim Wagner: Yes, if you reduce your retention you affect both user access and legal production.  Many companies will retain data for end user access, not realizing they are creating a legal risk in terms of collection, preservation, review and finally production.  Approaching the question "how long do I have to keep my data?" with the mindset of user access, burden of data retention and legal production obligations will drive the discussions to closure.  In today's legal business process management environment, retention models are often disconnected from the business workflows in the company.

Joshua Konkle: There appears to be some gap between what legal teams require to support eDiscovery and the capabilities available today in data management technology.  What advice do you have as a vendor trying to assist their clients in addressing litigation readiness and review costs challenges?

Jim Wagner: Regardless of what any software or other vendor suggests, there is no single application today that is going to address e-discovery from information management through to production, according to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM),

So here are DiscoverReady's tips:

• Learn about, but limit your exposure to immature products and technologies--they may be ready in time, but you don't have time to be their proving ground
• Avoid buying any application until you have successfully used it on a number of matters - start with low profile matters or old case data first
• Beware of making a long-term commitment (beyond 3 years) to any single application, as the technology in the space is evolving rapidly. 
• If you can, use a product "on demand" without paying a huge premium rather than buying a large and long-term license. 
• Make sure that the applications you use have good training manuals, sufficient release notes, and overall quality release programs.  Large user groups are also helpful.  Above all, use commercial off the shelf (COTS) software.
• Do not, however, believe everything you read--good or bad--as we have seen unsophisticated users posting messages at user group sites spread some very unreliable and inaccurate information.

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate the IT people on important legal concepts?

Jim Wagner: Some IT professionals are actually better-versed on discovery case law than their legal counterparts.  It's not that the level of IT interest is lacking - the bigger challenge is getting the legal team to review the case law and boil it down to a relatively clean list of rules the IT teams can follow.  IT professionals have a huge interest in solving the technical aspects of these problems, but legal has so many competing interests that it's difficult for them to resolve the issues to a "clean list of rules."

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate legal counsel on IT?

Jim Wagner: It is critical that the responsible lawyer understand what data exists and how it is stored and managed.  Appoint a lead from your legal team to liaise with your IT team across all matters and make it part of their "real job." 

There is no other option.

Some core examples for IT lawyers include understanding:

• how enterprise email systems work, including server storage versus local storage.
• the difference between archiving and journaling
• the difference between network disk storage and tape backup

Here's a basic example: if someone says email is backed up nightly (but not Journaled), the resultant backup is dependent on the daily email usage.  Under this scenario, users can delete "same day" email before the backup occurs and those messages will never appear on backup tapes.  Legal must understand the gaps like these in the data set and be able to address them in court. 

The greatest challenge we experience is the requirement to educate IT and legal teams on the downstream impact of their technology decisions (e.g., an application may be a dream to manage for the IT team but could be very poor for review and production purposes).  Our challenge is getting both teams to factor in functionality for all stakeholders and the impact of downstream costs, such as review, legal risk, analysis, etc., to their overall Return On Investment (ROI) calculations.

For example, Attenex is one of the best eDiscovery processing and review solutions in the enterprise market today.  They offer great documentation, a strong infrastructure and defensible reporting capability, which ensure the application is well-suited to serve the enterprise.  However, in making the decision whether to purchase an enterprise application like Attenex you must take into consideration a host of functionality and ROI-related factors, including cost to build technology infrastructure, as well as cost savings from improved attorney review.

The Internet is now a pervasive and ubiquitous tool for businesses and consumers alike. In whatever form the Internet is used - blogging, email, video or web browsing - the Internet now affects everyone in some way. In fact, it is hard to think of life as we know it today without Internet access though we are just a decade removed from little or no Internet access at all.

The trouble is more data means more Internet traffic and with it comes concerns about congestion on the Internet. It is not just more data; it is the type and amount of data traversing the Internet. Streaming video is first and foremost among the concerns about why Internet congestion appears inevitable. The Internet can probably handle for years to come text and even image-based website traffic like pictures and photos. But as NCAA basketball games, American Idol, the Olympics and other live events are transmitted over the Internet at the same time, these live transmissions have ramifications that go well beyond just poor video quality.

This type of traffic does not play to the strengths of the underlying network infrastructure of the Internet. Dropped packets require retransmissions. Retransmissions result in delays. Delays result in poor video quality creating frustrated users. However, the bigger question that Gary raises in the video is whose responsibility is it to pay for the infrastructure to improve this? Should the NCAA and America's colleges streaming the videos need to pay extra or the people watching the videos? And should that traffic run across the same Internet backbone that was designed to handle email and web browsing?

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. A bill entitled the Communications Opportunity Promotion Enhancement (COPE) is already working its way across Capital Hill with companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast on one side of the aisle and Google and Yahoo on the other. The telecoms are arguing for a "Use more, pay more" model while Google and Yahoo are calling for a "one size Internet fits all". Though no one winner has yet emerged, expect a premium tier of Internet service to eventually be forced on businesses that send or receive data volumes that exceed specified limits.

So what does this mean for businesses? It unclear at this point but it should clearly serve as a warning for businesses to get their collective act together and determine what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of what content they want their employees viewing over the Internet while at work as well as what sort of content their business makes available on the Internet. So whether employees are watching NCAA basketball games or your company  makes panoramics view of its parking lot available over the Internet, the premium associated with sending or receiving any of this type of content over the Internet seems destined to go up which may impact companies who are using the Internet for backup, replication or business continuity in ways they least expect.

Joshua Konkle: In your work with corporate legal counsel how do you help them synchronize their policies and their IT, what is the mood of legal counsel out there?

Jim Wagner: There is a lot of confusion out there, among legal counsel and IT alike.  Legal counsel may follow their clients in taking an "IT first" approach, assigning IT to the issue of solving the eDiscovery business process.  Typically, the firm's IT staff will have software tools for collecting data, but they have less documentation and understanding of some of the legal components required for the electronic discovery process, particularly at the point of review and production.  Thusly, organizations will allocate resources from within the legal group to act as a steward of process.  The process steward will collaborate with IT to help develop the technical solutions to support the organizations legal risks and challenges.

Furthermore, organizations' legal counsel and IT teams in the process of "getting up to speed," or making technology investments, need to be careful when taking the advice of eDiscovery "shamans".  In a positive context, a shaman is a helpful guide.  In the eDiscovery world, though, some shamans have used scare tactics and limited knowledge of client bases to instill fear and uncertainty about the eDiscovery process, generally for their own gain.  For example, a few years ago DiscoverReady had a conversation with a lawyer who needed high-level help understanding the basics of eDiscovery.  Three months later, he was listed on his firm's website as the eDiscovery practice leader.  DiscoverReady recommends legal counsel be aware of self-proclaimed experts and stay deeply involved in the eDiscovery process.

Interview note: recommended reading Davis, Seth. "New Practice Area May Be Emerging; the Future Looks Bright for Attorneys Who Specialize in E-Discovery." 28 National Law Journal S7 (July 17, 2006)

Joshua Konkle: How are you dealing with the forensic collection of Enterprise Blogs and Wikis?

Jim Wagner: The collection process is not particularly difficult for these systems.  The exception includes the dynamic nature of the underlying content and whether mechanisms are in place to capture each iteration, or version of the content.  Alternatively, the question is whether the changes are lost as the sites outlive their daily purpose.  The review and production of enterprise blogs, wikis, SharePoint, etc. is a difficult component of the process.  Traditional litigation support applications do not manage the rendering of these sites well, so traditional litigation support applications may need substantial modifications to accommodate Enterprise Blog and Wiki review and production.

Part 2: Educating IT and Legal on legal risk management

In any case, Wednesday morning kicked off with a breakfast meeting with Lucas Mearian, the Computerworld editor responsible for editing my columns that appear on Computerworld's website. We usually hook up at the SNW spring and fall shows to discuss what topics seem to be resonating with end users as well as to discuss where we should be taking the columns in the future.

One of the more interesting facts to come out of our conversation was the fact that Computerworld generally experiences a spike in traffic in March of every year and this year was no exception. Lucas is not exactly clear on why that is the case but suspects that March Madness may play a role in increased web traffic since users are in general spending more time online.

On my way to my next meeting with Hifn, Inc, I ran into Hifn's PR account manager, Scott Kline, of JPR Communications. He informed me that Hifn was unable to meet with me due to some channel meetings that Hifn was in that ended up running late. Unfortunately Scott couldn't let me disclose who Hifn was meeting with but he said to expect some major announcements from Hifn in the near future to compliment its SNW announcements that Hifn made about its software-based iSCSI bundle that turns existing storage systems into iSCSI storage appliances. 

My next meeting was with Symantec's Director of Storage Management Product Marketing, Sean Derrington, who I finally had the opportunity to put a face with a name. I have spoken to Sean numerous times over the years while writing for Storage magazine but never had the opportunity to meet him in person.

The briefing with Symantec was definitely not a briefing in the traditional sense. The previous morning, April 8, Symantec had contracted with Applied Research to do an on-site random survey of 100 users attending Storage Networking World. The profile of these users surveyed broke down as follows:

• 44% Storage Managers or System Administrators
• 27% IT Managers/C-Level Executives
• 64% from organizations with 1,000 employees
• 19% from organizations with less than 250 employees
• 44% work for organizations with more than 5,000 employees

The two most interesting results from this survey to me were that 100% of the respondents have deployed server virtualization and 73% of respondents are already using server virtualization in production or plans to move it into production. While the vast majority (86%) of the respondents were installing VMware software, equally interesting was the relatively large number of respondents (36%) that planned to implement Xen/Citrix. When I asked why this was the case neither Sean nor Tyler Carter, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, knew for sure since the survey only gathered high level information and not specifics. Virtual Iron was also notably absent from the list of server virtualization vendors.

The next meeting of note was with Emulex on Wednesday afternoon. They explained some of the features of their new FCoE converged network adapter (CNA) and what its benefits were. However, as I started to press for details, it became obvious that a CNA is anything but a plug-n-play proposition. CNAs require a 10 Gb/s enhanced Ethernet network, possible patches to the server operating system, an existing Fibre Channel SAN and a bridge to the FC SAN.

Emulex also distanced itself from providing any guidance on pricing. The CNA will not be GA until late Q208 and it declined to discuss pricing since prices are set by its resellers. All told, this FCoE announcement from all of the vendors left much to be desired (see my blog from last Friday) and users need to tread carefully before heading down the FCoE road so they are not sucked down into a storage networking and management vortex.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with a couple of vendors that I had not previously had the chance to meet. The first meeting was with STORServer's VP of Product Development, Laura Buckley, and VP of Business Development, Bob Antoniazzi. STORServer sells an all-in-one backup appliance that that uses Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) as the backup software and is targeted for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

While I am no big fan of TSM, I know many SMBs will love the idea that IBM software is running underneath STORServer's covers so I'm sure that helps STORServer's VARs close deals in accounts into which it sells. STORServer also ships it Data Protection Appliance preconfigured with hardware and the TSM software. This avoids the laborious task of configuring and managing TSM plus it provides customers with one throat to choke should support needs arise.

My final meeting of the conference was with Ocarina Networks' CEO Murli Thirumale and VP of Products, Carter George. Ocarina Networks has been one of the industry's worst kept secrets of the last year but finally emerged out of its not-so-stealthy stealth mode during SNW. In a nutshell, its Optimizer product is the next generation of super file compression designed specifically for compressing video and picture files.

The best way to understand how the Optimizer works is to look at two pictures where everything is essentially the same except for some minor details. Normal compression products can do little or nothing with these files since they are already compressed and deduplication products are equally worthless since they do not handle images well. The Optimizer, however, delves inside the file and gets down to the bit and byte levels so it can detect and identify similarities and differences between pictures or, in the case of video, each frame.

The Optimizer uses an out-of-band appliance to process pictures and videos that are stored for 30 days or more though this is policy driven. Due to the huge overhead associated with processing this type of data, each Optimizer server can process at most about 1 TB per day though clustered configurations are available. Right now Ocarina Networks is primarily targeting those accounts with large image file stores such as online picture or video stores (think YouTube, Amazon S3 or Nirvanix) or companies that maintain large internal stores of imagery such as oil and gas exploration companies.

My understanding is that 8 Gb/s FC represents the end of the upgrade cycle for the current generation of FC technology. Whether enterprises are running 1, 2, 4 or 8 Gb/s FC, the underlying optics are essentially the same allowing for interoperability between new HBAs and existing FC cables and directors. Most importantly, the FC infrastructure did not need to dramatically change from generation to generation as upgrades occurred or new products were released.

However those days are over. Again, as I understand it, the next FC upgrade cycle in data centers beyond 8 Gb/s, whether it is to 10 or 16 Gb/s FC, is going to require a rip-and-replace of the current data center FC infrastructure. With that looming, FC vendors knew they needed to cooperate and collaborate to keep FC viable regardless of which FC technology path users choose. Otherwise when users start to take a long, hard look at the pros and cons of FC versus InfiniBand during the next data center refresh cycle, 40 Gb/s InfiniBand stands an above average chance of replacing FC.

So to avert this, my guess is that the FC vendors concocted a plan: Use FCoE to connect all enterprise servers, get a few analysts on board to endorse the idea and then convince end-users to take their eyes off the longer term ramifications of using FCoE. By getting enterprise users to bite on FCoE and spend the next few years connecting their remaining 85% of their servers to  existing FC SANs, users are locked into FC for the next 10 years until the next disruptive technology comes along.

Now with the remaining 85% of the servers in the data center running FCoE, the most logical upgrade path for users for the original 15% of servers and storage is FC. Then regardless if the next FC upgrade is 10 Gb/s or 16 Gb/s FC, when the inevitable rip-and-replace comes in 2 - 4 years, FC lives on and InfiniBand remains a niche market.

Tuesday's announcement had less to do with what's best for the end users and everything to do with preserving Brocade's, Emulex's and Qlogic's core FC business. To do so, they needed Intel and Cisco to come on board, support it and promote it. If this FCoE initiative fails and users actually start to compare the benefits of InfiniBand to FC and realize that they can get 10x the benefits at the same cost as FC.  FC and InfiniBand could swap places.  Then FC could become the new niche market and InfiniBand may begin to dominate in the data center.

Look for my notes and thoughts on my Day 3 SNW briefings and meetings on Monday.

Xiotech made the first "earthshaking" announcements of the day at 7:00 am which mostly had those I spoke to shaking their heads trying to figure out what the announcement meant. The announcement centered on their new patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology that they acquired from Seagate last November that will, according to Xiotech, "virtually eliminate the need for service, scale from one terabyte to one petabyte and dramatically boost performance".

Exactly how ISEs do this on Xiotech's Emprise storage systems is unclear to me at this point. Their press release is long on the business benefits but vague on how it works. An analyst report put out by ESG labs may shed some further light on how this technology works and what its value is to end users though I still need to read through it to determine to what extent they address it.

Next up was a briefing with Data Direct Networks' Josh Goldstein. The most significant point of this conversation was the uptick Data Direct Networks has seen in the last two quarters in the number of its storage systems shipping with Infiniband. While Josh could not provide me with the exact numbers, he said that he had not closely examined the numbers for a couple of quarters and when he looked at them a couple of weeks ago, the numbers surprised even him.

A briefing with COPAN System's CEO Mark Ward followed. It was good to hear COPAN Systems has finally gotten off of its "We have MAID" soap box and moved on to selling product, instead of telling everyone about the wonders of MAID. While it shared some new evidence that using MAID would extend the life of hard drives from 600,000 hours of MTBF (mean time between failure) to 4 million hours, it more importantly has increased its employee count from 60 to 180 and is growing sales correspondingly.

Early in the afternoon Cisco, Emulex, Qlogic and everyone else's brother was supposed to be the 2nd "earthshaking" announcement of the day. Together they announced a new category of Converged Networks Adapter (CNA) cards that enable both storage and network traffic to be combined into a single unifed fabric. To do this, they are using the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol that converges Ethernet-based LAN and Fibre Channel-based SAN connectivity to a 10 Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet network.

Usually I am big fan of the "Ethernet for Everything" principal but not in this particular case. Despite their combined marketing muscle, their predominant presence in data centers and the ubiquitous nature of Ethernet, they are going to miss the mark short term.

I say this because Mellanox Technologies (who also announced a FCoE CNA w/Host Offload on Monday) had on April 1, 2008, announced a 40 Gb/s Infiniband card. Though this announcement definitely lacked the fanfare surrounding the FCoE announcement, 40 Gb/s beats 10 Gb/s according to my numbers. Equally importantly, there are emerging switch technologies from companies like Xsigo Systems that capitalize on the virtualization I/O benefits that Infiniband provides, Infiniband's roadmap is much more robust that Ethernet and its price point is the same or less than than these new FCoE. While Mellanox's VP of Product Marketing, Thad Omura, told me that FCoE really won't gain much traction until 2009, I see that as a best case scenario.

My final briefing was with Bocada's Nancy Hurley who provided me some insight into how
Bocada is adapting to the recent changes in market conditions for the data protection and recovery management (DPRM) market. Bocada Enterprise is finding itself engaged in new battles with EMC and Symantec at the enterprise level with backup reporting. Hurley says Bocada is often winning in head-to-head bake-offs but when pricing is introduced, EMC and Symantec are including or packaging their data protection management software for "free" as part of larger backup software or storage deals.

To address this, Bocada is starting to switch gears and position Bocada Enterprise as a Unified Management Platform. It is capitalizing on the agentless architecture and analytics already found in Bocada Enterprise and adding new features to specifically manage Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). To introduce this functionality, Bocada has signed a 6,000 seat agreement with Microsoft where it will test drive this new functionality.

Look for my day 3 SNW thought and comments by mid-day tomorrow.

Please email Jerome Wendt directly at blog.master(at)dciginc.com with comments and corrections.