Archive for the ‘Martin Tuip’ Category

As expected the archiving functionality in Exchange 2010 created quite a bit of a buzz with people and most have been wondering how in reality the archiving functionality stacks up against traditional archiving products like Mimosa NearPoint.   Microsoft positions Exchange 2010 archiving at the moment as a Personal Archive and suggests customers who have a strict need for compliance to look at business archiving solutions under which they classify Mimosa NearPoint which offers besides email archiving, advanced eDiscovery, File System Archiving and SharePoint Archiving.

Archiving software has been around for a decade now and eventually organizations will start to question if the product they initially deployed is still offering them value or if there are better solutions out there that match their requirements better.  After the decision has been made to pick a better archiving solution the obvious question arises on how to get the data out of the current existing system and into the new system.

Exchange Storage management was what triggered the rapid uprise in email archiving tools in the beginning of the 2000.  It was primarily caused by the limited end user mailbox sizes that was caused by the limitations in storage, software and overall cost associated with it.  In the years after, organizations embraced stubbing as a means to clean out end users mailboxes in an attempt to keep storage costs in control.

United States District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin issued five groundbreaking opinions in 2003 and 2004,  on the now very much known case of Zubulake v UBS Warburg.  This case is generally considered the first definitive case in the United States on a wide range of electronic discovery issues. These issues include:

• Data sampling
• The scope of the duty to preserve electronic evidence during the course of the litigation

In the case of Starbucks Corp. v. ADT Security Servs., Inc., 2009 WL 4730798 (W.D. Wash. Apr. 30, 2009) the defendant, ADT Security Services tried to avoid its obligation to product archived email data because they were not reasonably accessible because of undue burden and/or cost which is one of the terms used in the FRCP rulings.  To support this statement ADT provided various estimates of the potential cost of time and money to restore the requested data.  However, the plaintiff (Starbucks in this case), countered this statement with their calculation of the exercise which were significant lower than those suggested by ADT.

First of all, many of you are wondering what RBS is.  Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an API that is available as an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.  It is designed to actually move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from costly storage on database servers to cheaper storage solutions and is also available as  such for SharePoint Portal Server.  The advantages of RBS are that it can save you a significant amount of storage space, conserves hardware resources and allows the end user transparent access to their data.

An article published this week by InformationWeek talks about how Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said last month that it is examining the privacy and data security implications of cloud computing for consumers. I personally don’t think that the FTC is going far enough as it is my opinion that creating gigantic repositories of electronic data, whether it is personal, business or consumer data is becoming an attractive target for data mining.

A lot of companies are thinking about scaling out their Exchange environment through ‘cheaper’ DAS storage and giving end users basically an unlimited mailbox.  Whilst I can’t deny that scalability has grown since the first days I started to work with Exchange 4.0 back in the mid 1990s, the reality of being able to give someone an unlimited mailbox has a few snags in it.

Those that understand storage well have a good idea on IOPs.  IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) is a common benchmark for harddisks and other computer storage media. Like with any benchmark, IOPS numbers published by drive and SAN vendors are often misleading and do not guarantee real-world application performance.  The specific number of IOPS possible in any server configuration will vary greatly depending upon the variables the tester enters into the program, including the balance of read and write operations, the mix of random or sequential access patterns, the number of worker threads and queue depth, as well as the data block sizes.