Getting the conversation started

Well, I guess I really am joining the blogging bandwagon.  Although, I suppose blogging has been sufficiently eclipsed by Twitter that it can't really be thought of as a bandwagon anymore.  At least not a cool bandwagon.  The preceeding is by way of a welcome to my blog. 

What's the blog about?

It is not a forum for Exchange announcements, nor a place where you can get the latest Exchange rollup nor what is in it nor what the dates for the next release are.  My answers would probably be wrong and there is a perfectly good source for stuff like that:  www.msexchangeteam.com

No really, what's it about?

Some enthusiastic people in marketing think that some of the conversations that I have with customers and partners about the Exchange perspective on technology trends in our industry and how those trends shape our key design decisions (especially around storage technology) might be valuable to other humans.  I have resisted that input for years because talking to customers one-on-one is fun and writing stuff down in a blog sounds like work.  They promise me it really will be fun and I don't need to worry about being overly edited, so here goes.

That still doesn't answer the question does it?  Well, I don't really know yet.  Certainly there are some questions that I think it would be great to cover directly or indirectly such as:  Does Exchange really hate SANs?  Can Enterprises really live without a backup?  Isn't tiered storage the greatest thing since Saran Wrap?  Don't you need Enterprise disks to run your Enterprise on?  I hope the topics that get initiated here are just the jumping off point for more interesting conversations.  It is the back and forth that makes talking to customers directly so interesting.

Who am I?

I'm Perry Clarke -- Currently, I run the Exchange Mailbox Server Engineering team.  That has been my role through the Exchange 2007 and 2010 releases and we did make a lot interesting bets through those releases we can talk about.  Now, I finally have time for things like this.

To get on with it:  I recently spent some time chatting to Ann Vu about disk capacity and I/O efficiency and the marketing team turned it into a video (the first of a video series).

I'm interested in any questions or comments the answers spark - what's your view on storage trends and how we've architected Exchange?

Thanks,

Perry