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"They didn't have the burden of legacy products," said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "I've been following the e-mail archive market for a while and there's a lot of applications out there that have simply aged. EMC took tool a little longer than it probably would have liked to have, but it redesigned the e-mail archive architecture to meet the requirements that have evolved over the last four or five years."

EMC claims SourceOne users can save more than 50% in total cost of ownership, and ROI in as little as 12 months by reducing e-mail kept on primary storage systems, redundant attachments and lengthy, manual discovery processes.

Johnson and Heiliger said they began building the new storage system to better handle the growing number of photos Facebook has to store. Many of their 175 million and 200 million users share photos of everything from their pets to vacations, weddings to days at the beach. That means that users are posting and calling up their own photos, as well as their friends' and family members' photos, as well. Keeping those trains running efficiently and on time was a growing challenge.

Johnson said that so far the rollout of the new system has gone very smoothly.

And Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, told Computerworld today that based on their tests, Haystack is more than 50% faster than traditional photo storage systems.

April 2, 2009 (Computerworld) EMC Corp. today announced a new family of e-mail archiving and e-discovery applications that can centrally managing multiple content types in order to apply consistent retention, disposition and overall lifecycle management regardless desktop wallpaper of the hardware platform.

Initially, EMC is announcing three products aimed at e-mail archiving and discovery, but more content archiving and discovery products will follow over the next 12 to 18 months, said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer for the company's Content Management and Archiving Division.

The company is closing in on a big milestone -- 200 million users, executives said today.

Tidmarsh said part of the problem with the way desktop wallpaper archiving has been done to date is that each application or information source tends to have its own archive repository and archive rules, and some support retention management, while others don't. For example, SAP application data and e-mail documents have separate archiving utilities.

A spokesman for Facebook said more specifics about the system will be released in a few weeks.

Johnson, though, said the new system is so much faster than the previous one because of changes made to its setup. Haystack is tailored for small files that don't change very often, instead of for a small number of large files that are changing all the time. Traditional file directories also need file names and a lot of resource cost goes to just finding the files. With the new system, however, he said they don't have to deal with directory structures or file names. They use ID numbers instead of names. That mapping is very small.

The three new applications are:
 Needing to better deal with 50 billion files worth of photos, engineers at Facebook are installing a new photo storage system they say is 50% faster than traditional systems.

Tom Leizear, director of IT at Access Intelligence LLC, a publishing and marketing firm, said his company is currently using SourceOne Email Management and in the first 40 days of production deployment, "we saw a 66% reduction in mailbox size."

Five-year-old Facebook's user base passed one-time leader MySpace last year, according to a recent report.

"So there's a siloed approach that's inconsistent from application to application," Tidmarsh said. "While to an extent that's been effective, times have changed. There's a very distinct pressure on IT to reduce cost."

The storage system, dubed Haystack, has been under development in-house for the past couple of years and Facebook has been rolling it out in limited test versions to parts of the network for the past few months. The company expects to use Haystack to store all Facebook photos by next week, according to Boby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook.

Facebook, once thought of as the up-and-coming social network, had almost 222 million unique visitors last month, while MySpace came in at 125 million, according to online researcher comScore Inc. That's a dramatic change since the Facebook-MySpace race for unique visitors was a near dead heat in April 2008.

"In addition, we were able to reduce backup and recovery time from two and a half hours to 30 minutes," he added.

While EMC's e-mail archiving and ediscovery products are not unique among competitors such as Symantec's Enterprise Vault, Mimosa Systems' NearPoint, HP's Integrated Archive Platform and Atomomy's Zantaz product, the SourceOne products do have the advantage of being created from a green field.

Johnson noted that Facebook deals with 15 billion photos - not including all of the replications. Their user data grows by 500GB a day. And they have 50 million requests per second to their backend servers.

"In terms of cost, if it's twice as efficient, we can have desktop wallpaper 50% less hardware," said Johnson. "With 50 billion files on disk, the cost adds up. It's essentially give us some [financial] headroom."

• EMC announces content archiving, e-discovery applications
• EMC announces content archiving, e-discovery applications
• EMC announces content archiving, e-discovery applications