Orlando, Observed

Coping with growth: "I have stared storage growth in the face this year, and it's a very scary thing," quipped one technical manager for a major U.S. bank as he gave a presentation this week.

e-Discovery: This is the new compliance. Storage managers are concerned about finding the data they need to save, making sure it's archived cost-effectively, and being able to retrieve it quickly when regulators or lawyers come calling. This agenda involves new approaches to working with in-house records experts. (See Storage Gets on Record.) It also has become a proving ground for a slew of new products for indexing, classifying, and searching stored content. (See Archiving Gets a Refresh and Content Classifiers Glom Onto Google.)

Email: Related to e-discovery. Email management is a chief concern of storage managers these days, who are intent on finding the best way to store it, track it, plan capacity for it, back it up, and be ready to produce it in court if need be. When you're talking 25 Gbytes of input and output messages per day, as Jim Brady, the email administrator of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center described Wednesday, the scope of the problem is clear.

Accounting: Fed up with a lack of adequate SRM tools, storage networkers are becoming their own beancounters these days in an effort to justify burgeoning storage costs. In one session here Thursday, Bill Eddins and Jackson Shea, two IT leads from Pacific Northwest health plan provider the Regence Group, described how they turned a Quicken package into a storage bookkeeping and reporting tool. They now plan to use it as a reference point in their search for SRM tools to flesh out their strategy. Their work was praised by the SNIA End User Council, and audience participants alluded to similar projects.

Virtualization: We're talking storage and servers here. The storage challenges of working with VMware surfaced continually at this week's show. How to provision storage for virtual servers and manage virtualized storage were freqent topics in forums and offline. See you at VMworld!

Key Management: Despite plenty of vendor security hype, attendees voiced their concern about technology progress in this area. (See Security Smorgasbord on Show and NeoScale Faces Up to 4-Gig Encryption.)

"OK, I have got encryption, but then there's an ugly thing called key management," warned John Rotchford, managing director of analyst firm Strategic Advisory Services International (SASI) , during a presentation.

"It's definitely a big deal," agreed an IT manager from a Midwestern manufacturing firm, who asked not to be be named. "If you don't get it right then the encryption can either hold your data hostage, or give you a false sense of security if the keys are compromised," he added.

Vendors, apparently, should step up to the plate. "There's very good key management for a small number of keys, but to put this out for large deployment, that's an area that's lacking," said the IT manager.

Services: Users were divided on the benefits of combined security and storage services from a single vendor. (See Symantec Sets Out Roadmap, IBM Up-Ends Security, and RSA Touts Achievements.) "We're considering it -- at least we hope that people will be able to fix things faster," said one CIO, during a question and answer session.

But the IT manager from the manufacturing firm is still not convinced. "We like to go with different vendors, because if there's a fault on one product, you have a backup," he explained.

Mergers & Acquisitions: There was also speculation about which major storage vendor will be next to follow the lead of EMC and snap up a big name security specialist. (See EMC Secures RSA for $2.1B, RSA Stockholders OK Deal, and EMC Acquires RSA.) "When are the other large OEMs going to follow EMC?" asked SASI analyst Rotchford, adding that HP could be amongst the next vendors to take the M&A plunge.

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC)

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