"Storage as a Service" - The Emergence of Digital Self Storage (DSS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is rapidly becoming mainstream. Before the dot.com crash a lot of powerpoint presentations floated around Wall Street promoting this concept but it took the success of SalesForce.com for SaaS to be accepted. Microsoft, taking one of its greatest ever shifts, will soon and for the first time, begin selling software not as installable code but as functionality delivered over the Internet. SaaS is not a new phenomenum but now that even the worlds biggest software company is lining up behind it, it has been legitimized.

But just as businesses and consumers are growing comfortable with hosted software, they are by extension becoming equally comfortable with off-site storage of their data. GMail one-upped Hotmail and took the industry from hosted software to hosted software-and-storage when it provided users with 1 gigabyte of hosted email storage. Similarly, Yahoo! Photos lets individuals store their family photos on a server heaven-knows where. And in business, SalesForce.com stores valuable customer data in a location far far away from the office. Most SalesForce.com customers and Yahoo! Photos users probably have no idea where their data is stored, and nor do they care. People have shown that they don't really care all that much where something valuable is kept. What they do care about is how easily they can get it when they need it.

"Storage as a Service" or Digital Self Storage (DSS) is emerging as a colossal new market. Think of it as the digital equivalent of those popular self-storage rental units you store away those collectables you don't have room for in your home but with which you can't bare to part. People are inherently pack-rats, and for this reason, I expect that DSS will in the near future become as mainstream as Hotmail.

E-mail is often personal and even sentimental. The Pack Rat Creed says that "Thou shouldn't discard anything in the odd chance it might be needed later". This applies to digital data as much as to other collectables. And, it applies to e-mail data as much as to other data.

Watch for the expansion of Digital Self-Storage services offering long-term easily accessible archiving of email, instant messaging, personal records, and other individual data, similar to Yahoo! Photos.

The convergence of convenience and trust often spawns exciting new breakthrough technologies or services like SaaS and DSS. Their growing popularity appeals equally to consumers and small businesses and reflects the progressive blurring of the lines of distintion between these two markets.

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No Need to Rush into Upgrading that Exchange 5.5 Server

Matt Cain, Vice President at Gartner Group this week advised Exchange 5.5 customers not to upgrade to Exchange 2003 saying that it would be better for them to wait and upgrade directly to Exchange 2007 when it's available sometime in 2008. According to Cain, rather than rushing into a 2003 migration, and then to 2007, customers would be better off to wait and take the time to prepare properly for a direct migration to the latest release. Sounds very logical.

However, the severely limited message store capacity of 5.5 gives organizations using this older platform storage nightmares. The thought of extending the life of 5.5 for another 1-2 years is a discomforting one for many. According to Gartner, at least 20% of the current Exchange install base is still on the old 5.5.

Relief from these storage nightmares that 5.5 customers could come in an e-mail archiving solution. But choose one that is economical and simple to deploy because if your e-mail archiving implementation results in excessive cost or complications you might just as well have migrated.

The NorthSeas solution for example, stores mail as files on network storage while keeping an index of metadata on the appliance. Users can search through their archived mail by searching through the index. When a message needs to be retrieved the NorthSeas appliance simply redelivers it to their mailbox (we call it "replay"). When you do decide to upgrade to Exchange 2007, the process for accessing older archived mail remains unchanged and mail retrieved from the archive is again simply replayed to the new mailbox on the 2007 server, instead of to the old 5.5 server. So with a set up like this, only a minimal amount of mail needs to be left on the 5.5 server and yet users are provided with unlimited storage, with any message retrievable within just a few seconds.

If you are looking for product information please go to http://www.northseasamt.com/