The Condrey Corp. Blog

Condrey Corp. Developed Products Featured at NUI Groups

Doug Ouzts, Condrey Corporation Director of Product Development participated remotely in the Puget Sound Network Users Group’s (PSNUG) monthly meeting held on July 30. PSNUG is a NUI group in the state of Washington that was formed in 1987. Doug demonstrated Novell Storage Manager and DocXchanger and gave a slide presentation on Kanaka. According to Doug, there was a lot of interest in each product.

We were also asked to provide product materials to a brand new NUI group in Kentucky that will be meeting for the first time this week.

Look for our Kanaka ad in the upcoming August edition of Novell Connection Magazine.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Meeting with IDC Storage Analysts

On Monday of this week, Condrey Corporation CEO David Condrey met with three IDC storage analysts at IDC headquarters in Framingham, MA. The meeting was the result of a short conversation that David had with an IDC analyst following her presentation at Computerworld Storage Networking World in April.

The anlayst's presentation was entitled “Next Generation File Services” and included a significant amount of data on storage growth trends. Her presentation concluded with a “wish list” of storage technologies that, as far as she knew, were not available. These were “integrating information intelligence with policies managing data placement, retention, protection, etc.”

David talked to her after her presentation and informed her that Novell Storage Manager did in fact, provide policy-based storage management, data placement, retention and more, and that it was available today. They agreed that a product briefing was in order, and Monday’s on-site briefing was a result.

Overall, the meeting went very well. David was not only able to explain to the analysts how Novell Storage Manager works, but was also able to get some great feedback on features and product delivery ideas we’re considering.

We were told that an IDC product profile on Novell Storage Manager will be forthcoming.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Products Showcased at Novell Users Group of Indiana (NUGI) Event

NUGI is a very active Novell Users Group in Indiana. NUGI’s most recent quarterly event was entitled “NUGI IX – No Slide Shows.” The one-day event took place at on July 25 at Southwest Allen County Schools in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Representatives of more than 70 schools were there to learn about education software solutions for their Novell networks, including Novell Storage Manager and DocXchanger developed by Condrey Corporation.

Novell Storage Manager was demonstrated by Norm O’Neal and Teresa Kratzer, The demonstration was a real time look at Beech Grove City Schools deployment and configuration of the product including student “digital lockers” and automated class storage for retrieving and handing in assignments.  According to Norm, all attendees were very impressed with the demonstration.

Later, DocXchanger was included in Greg Long’s “Cool Tools for Everyday eHelpDesk” demonstration. Greg oversaw the deployment of DocXchanger at Community Schools of Frankfort – which is detailed in a recently-published success story that each attendee received a copy of. Like the demonstration that preceded his, the DocXchanger demonstration was in real time, showing how the product is deployed and configured.

Norm O’Neal, who heads the NUGI group, has posted a nice summary of the event on YouTube.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Take a Peek at Some Interface Designs for Novell Storage Manager 2.5

During a presentation at the Novell TTP meetings in Provo last week, Condrey Corporation CEO David Condrey talked about the redesigned interface that will be in Novell Storage Manager 2.5 and shared a few early screen shots being developed. I thought I would share a couple of them here.

Note: You will need to view them 100 percent to see the interface detail.

You can see that in addition to new icons, we’ll be introducing tabbed management pages including some with forms.

These screen shots are by no means finalized. As we proceed through our beta cycle, we’ll be getting feedback and make modifications and improvements accordingly.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Novell TTP Briefings

Condrey Corporation CEO David Condrey is at the Novell development site in Provo, Utah with Director of Partner Management Doug Ouzts this week for a series of meetings. This morning, David made a presentation to members of the Novell Technology Transfer Partners (TTP) USA organization, who have close to 100 members meeting in Provo this week. David gave a session on the soon-to-be-released Novell Storage Manager 2.5 followed by DocXchanger.  I am including a picture from one of the sessions.

I should mention that Ed Shropshire, Director of Product Management, did a similar series of sessions to the Novell TTP EMEA organization back in April.

Today’s sessions went very well. Since the TTP organization is comprised of members from academic organizations (both K-12 and higher education), the presentations were specific to education and demonstrated how DocXchanger and Novell Storage Manager solve specific IT challenges pertaining to file location, remote access, file sharing, and user and group file-based storage at academic institutions.

Strengthening David’s presentation, were the comments TTP members in attendance that are DocXchanger and Novell Storage Manager customers.

David and Doug have meetings scheduled in Provo throughout the remainder of the week.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manger

Languishing in Storage

A Washington Technology article published this week summarizes the findings of a study by NetApp, Inc. and the University of California. A team comprised of both groups conducted a three-month examination of the traffic that flowed through NetApp's enterprise file servers, which according to the article, manage more than 22TB of material relating to all aspects of the company's business operations.

The most notable findings were:

• 90 percent of the files stored on the servers were never accessed
• Among the less than 10 percent of the files that were accessed, 65 percent were only opened once

The article’s author, Joab Jackson then quotes Andrew Leung, a computer science researcher at the University of California: “Organizations might want to consider moving much of their data to slower but less expensive storage units since it rarely gets accessed.”

These findings are similar to the findings we’ve gathered through the research we’ve conducted over the years, and validate why we develop Novell Storage Manager.

Novell Storage Manager automates full life cycle management of user and group storage through policies that reside in network directory services (eDirectory or Active Directory). This management includes the ability to automatically move files and folders that have not been accessed for a certain amount of time to less expensive storage.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

 

Addressing Email Capacity Limits by Eliminating Attachments

C2C, an email data management company recently financed a third-party survey on corporate email. Some of the findings were published in ByteandSwitch. One interesting point from the findings was that almost a third of respondents had mailbox capacity limits set at less than 100MB, which the publication states is “very low considering email attachments can be several megabytes each.”

Of course, 100MB is probably more than enough space for users in organizations that have deployed DocXchanger and share large files and folders through “sharing links” rather than email attachments.

A sharing link is an embedded hyperlink to the network-stored file or folder. It is delivered as an email, but has no attachment. To access the file or folder, you simply click the hyperlink and through the Web, access the file or folder directly from the server where it resides.

If you’d like to see how a sharing link works yourself, I’d be happy to send you one. Just send me an email request at bgashler@condreycorp.com

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Managing Unstructured Data

An article in a South African IT journal caught my eye yesterday. Titled “Firms Failing to Manage Unstructured Data,” the article references a Butler Group report on document and records management and then states that companies leave themselves open to risk unless they deal with the various industry-related compliance issues, including the management of unstructured data.

According to the Butler Group Report (without alterations to regional spelling used in the article)

“Organisations continue struggling to manage growing volumes of information, having little idea or control over content employees create or retain,” she says. “They are exposing themselves to risk, particularly as the fines for non-disclosure grow in size as the courts and regulators become tougher on organisations unable to fulfil disclosure requests. In addition, they typically suffer brand damage. Senior executives must understand their responsibilities for the management of information claiming ignorance of poor practices is no defence.”

This information was quite timely as I am currently working on a new white paper for this summer’s release of the next version of Novell Storage Manager, which includes a large section on industry regulation compliance.

To summarize what’s brought out in the white paper:

Novell Storage Manager takes unstructured and unmanaged date and moves it to a structured and managed state. It ensures regulatory compliance and reduces risk through identity and policies that are enforced automatically, making storage much less vulnerable to certain types of security threats, particularly human errors in manual data input and manipulation.

In an audit, Novell Storage Manager can provide the reports and archived files needed to prove compliance. Rich reporting features and real-time monitoring tools provide an accurate view of data storage conditions at any given moment. Misplaced data is never an issue. Users’ storage will follow them, no matter where they work in the organization. When an employee leaves, a company’s intellectual property remains safe and accessible. Policies can be configured so that Novell Storage Manager automatically does any number of things with the user’s storage: archives it, deletes it or even forwards it to a manager for further review.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

Data Disposition

A recent article in Informationweek.com on data disposition caught my eye this week. Data disposition is the permanent disposal of corporate files. Despite the perception that corporate files need to be stored indefinitely, it’s a practice that the Supreme Court has ruled is permissible. The author, Andrew Conry-Murray, strongly advocates the practice, and ironically, for the benefit of lawsuit defenses.

One interesting part of the article was the author’s support for a system that automates this disposal, pointing out that “… a sound disposition policy will help enterprises reduce storage costs and reclaim disk space.”

Of course, Novell Storage Manager addresses data disposition automatically through vaulting, which includes a “Delete on Vault” option. This means that files that are determined safe for disposal will be purged whenever a Backfill operation is conducted.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager

The End of the Green Shirt

While on vacation with my family last week, I got an email from our Green Technology session coordinator at Alternative Technology Inc. that she wanted each person on the panel to wear a green shirt during both days of our session. Since I didn't own a green shirt, this meant that I had to go out and buy one. I certainly didn't want to be the only person in the session panel (comprised of Citrix, HP, VMWare, WYSE, and Novell) without a green shirt. So imagine my dismay yesterday to see only two panelists in green! Luckily, our session coordinator was in green (including painted green toenails) so I didn't feel completely out of place.

I wore the green shirt again today for the sessions and was happy to see that there was a new panelist that was also wearing green. Of course, like me and the other panelist in green, we quickly ditched the shirts after the sessions. Chances are, I won't be wearing the green shirt again this year.

Our three sessions this morning were well attended and each went very well. Each panelist talked about development measures their companies had made within their products to provide the means of saving energy. This led to some discussion among the panelists and attendees on the Green Grid (of which Novell is a member) state government incentives for "going green", as well as actual savings that can be realized through some more eco-friendly implementations.

Last night's vendor fair went very well. We talked to a lot of VARs about products within the Novell Identity and Security Management business unit, including Novell Storage Manager.

Buck Gashler
Strategic Marketing Manager