Verizon finally broke their silence this morning and announced the release of the Blackberry Storm2 this Wednesday, October 28.

The Storm2 resembles much of its predecessor, with some cosmetic and some functional improvements (read bug fixes), but most importantly the addition of Wi-Fi. The Boy Genius Report is currently testing a production unit and will be posting a full review shortly.

There has been much speculation over Verizon’s unusually low-profile release of the Storm2. Could this perhaps be a direct result of the disappointing results for the original Storm – both in terms of total sales and customer (dis)satisfaction? There were rumors that the Storm had the highest return rate of any phone right after its original release.

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The latest version of Lotus Notes Traveler that has shipped with the recent release of Lotus Domino 8.51 now natively supports the iPhone and many other prevalent mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile and Symbian.

This is long awaited relief for corporate iPhone users, since the previously announced Domino “integration” was a rather underwhelming light web client, missing crucial offline capabilities.

Lotus Traveler now provides full push-email, calendar and contact synchronization that enables the user to work offline. In addition, new enterprise features like remote wipe, to erase data on lost or stolen phones, are critical to gain corporate acceptance.

It is good to see that IBM Lotus is finally closing this critical gap in mobile integration.  Support for these new mobile devices and the already existing, strong integration with the Blackberry enables Lotus Notes Domino for the vast majority of all smartphones currently available.

Roger Matus asks this question on his “DeathbyEmail” blog.

Like it our not, our email inboxes have become the virtual filing cabinets of our lives. Most of our personal and business communication eventually travels through email, and lots of critical data ends up being stored in our mail boxes. Surprisingly, not many of us ever contemplate what would happen if that information were instantly and irretrievably lost.

BusinessWeek just published an article: “Web-Based E-Mail: Businesses Beware.” The subtitle: “Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and lots of others offer these free or low-cost services, but if there’s a snafu or e-mails with essential information are lost, you’re likely to be out of luck.”

The old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true for email as well. Many of the popular free or low-cost email services have had their fair share of data snafus. One ISP even lost the emails of 14,000 customers.

So if you enjoy the convenience and the “price” of any of these free email accounts, plan for contingencies and please make a backup. This could be as simple as syncing a local copy with a free desktop email client such as Thunderbird via POP.

Permessa Email Control! Express (ECX) just won the prestigious Gold Award from MSExchange.org, the leading Microsoft Exchange Server resource site.  A detailed review was written by Brian M. Posey, six time winner of Microsoft’s MVP award and recognized Microsoft Exchange expert.

Here are some of the things Posey said:

“I was fairly impressed by the types of information that Permessa ECX is able to extract from the Exchange logs.”

“Permessa ECX’s message tracking capabilities are probably its best feature. … The software makes it really quick and easy to track messages.”

“The software makes it simple to set up a health check.  …  You are not putting too much of an additional load on the servers that are being monitored.  …  Another thing that I really like is that the health check even draws a topology diagram of your Exchange organization and shows you where any problems are.”

You can see the complete review here.

The msexchange team blog reports:

“Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and on its way to General Availability”.

The next version of MS-Exchange is expected to be released at the Tech-Ed Europe event on November 9.

David Sengupta sums it up on the Ferris Blog:

Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.

The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.

The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.

As reported by Computerworld, MySpace announced this week that it has switched from using traditional hard disk drives in its servers to using Solid-State-Disk (flash drives) as primary storage instead.  The new SSD drives are actually PCIe cards, from Fusion-io, containing the solid state chips.

“MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers.”

The cards currently come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities and a 1.28TB card is expected later this year.

In recent years the trend for email servers has been to consolidate and centralize. A massive n-way server or cluster is often hosting tens-of-thousands of user mailboxes using massive and expensive NAS storage arrays. Some of our customers are already rethinking this approach by taking lessons from the cloud.

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