How much email do you have? How much email do you need to keep? Can you produce electronic documents, including email, if forced to by court order.

Email is not only a corporate asset but is becoming an increasingly needed piece of collateral in leagal compliance. And email storage is reportedly grwoing at an average rate of 35% anually (source:Sunbelt Software). It is just out of hand and maybe it's time for a messaging archiving system.

A Guide to Understanding Messaging Archiving is research / white paper that discusses the several reasons to implement a messaging archiving system

Worthy of a download, read, and future reference piece.

Being a DBA of 15+ years, I am always a bit hesitant of new technologies and features that are supposed to make my life easier. While at the core, many of the new technologies and features are great ideas, they are often ahead of their time and take time to get rid of the kinks.

Regardless, virtualization is one of those areas that is starting to become more mainstream and might take a closer look. Here is a eSeminar that is supposed to explore how virtualization can help DBAs manage their databases through provisioning and management from the instance and database level. This sounds interesting enough. Hope something pressing doesn't come up and then I'll be online watching.

Registration at: Virtualization, Automation, and Databases
Jun 25, 2008
2:00 p.m. Eastern/11:00 a.m. Pacific
Duration: 60 minutes

Convolve, the holder of a patent that limits vibrations in hard drives has claimed Dell Inc and two suppliers (Western Digital, and Hitachi) have infringed on the patent. Despite earlier talks between Convolve and Dell some 10 years ago about Dell licensing the patent, Dell just never entered into a licensing agreement.

The technology in question was actually issued to Convolve back in 1990 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, limits vibrations, and was used in NASAs Space Shuttle.

Will Dell get out of this web?

An interesting write up on the top five current trends in storage: The Five Biggest Storage Trends. I don't know if these are in any particular order but the list consisted of:

Virtualization - direct-attached storage is giving way to NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Networks) and paving the way for flexibility, resiliency, and availability.

10 Gigabit Ethernet vs. Fiber Channel - 10 Gbe are threatening the long time undisputed standard Fiber Channel for interconnect in the datacenter.

Disk vs. Tape - Easy enough here, disk is in and tape is out. I guess there is just something about reliability and speed.

De-Duplication - We've been talking about this one a bit here on on-storage and it just makes sense to reduce the amount of data we backup by only backing up the data that has changed.

Flash-based storage - A few of the vendors are starting to ship solid-state disks with their systems. While the price is still a bit high for large storage pools, it makes complete sense for some applications.

Yipii! A little surfing today revealed that Nintendo just might be adding additional storage capacity to the Wii. The blog posting I sighted states that someone has "dug up plans by the Japanese gaming giant to hire a "Wii Software/Hardware developer who can develop "a plan for Wii's USB devices.""

While most agree that Nintendo will more than likely not put something inside the machine, a USB or SD card is might be in the works. It has also been suggested that since the Wii is approaching its two years on the market, a quick USB hub just might be the right prescription to keeping it on the top for at least one more Christmas season.

Read more at:
Wii getting external hard drive?

Guess the name really doesn't matter but, Symantec and Citrix have joined forces to offer a virtual server and storage infrastructure called Veritas Virtual Infrastructure (VxVI). Claiming to manage thousands of virtual machines and associated storage from a single interface.

Veritas will be brining their ability to effectively manage storage from the physical to the virtual, including direct control of block storage from a guest virtual server, block storage functionality, including mirroring across heterogeneous arrays, and SAN-based multi-pathing for data availability. Citrix will be brining their XenServer to virtualize servers to enable sharing of common boot images across multiple virtual servers and streamline the provisioning process.

There is no mention of how long these two companies have been working on this solution but they do report that the work was more than slapping two stand alone products together.

Read more about this product at Citrix XenServer
Or see the podcast The Benefits of Virtualizing XenApp with XenServer