My latest revelation came during a recent visit to AMD for a day of briefings, mostly about the Barcelona quad-core Opteron and the Torrenza direct-connect coprocessor interface. During that visit, I got the briefest of updates on ATI’s new GPU (graphics processing unit) technology. It will ship with software that plays movies on Blu-ray discs. The AMD rep spelled it out in words that would have been undiplomatic coming from me: He said that the new chips will “block unauthorized access to the frame buffer.” In short, that means an unauthorized party can’t save the contents of the display to a file on disk unless the content owner approves it.

There is a short list of parties who will be unauthorized to access your frame buffer: You. There is a long list of parties who are authorized to access your frame buffer, and that list includes Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, ATI, NVidia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, HBO, CBS, Macrovision, and all other content owners and enablers that want your machine to themselves whenever you’re watching, listening to, reading, or shooting monsters with their products.

Video, audio, and software will all drive a similar road, that being a single, unmodifiable path from the original encoded, licensed source to rendering, and on to delivery (display, headphones, portable device, printer, or memory for execution of software). This bit of progress seems to have little relevance to IT until you expand the meaning of the word “content” to encompass that which you create that is consumed by human eyes and ears.

As people working the IT side of business, academia, and government, we know all too well that personal and customer information, trade secrets, and other varieties of confidential data can be intercepted using tricks similar to those that are used to swipe movies and music. IT content needs that direct path from source media to delivery, too, so that possession of encoded media -- say, a Blu-ray disc -- is critical to viewing, listening, or executing.

For example, right now there is no unbreakable way to arrange that a PDF or other sort of viewable document can’t be copied or at least stored as a snapshot of the display. The audio portion of a classified presentation can be recorded as easily as hooking an analog or digital recorder into the headphone output. HTML would be a much more viable means of rendering rich content if it could be protected. Rich document and multimedia rendering engines would know if they were talking to delivery devices that were specifically matched with physically secure equipment. If a renderer couldn’t verify that a display or headset that it trusts was the sole source of delivery, nothing would appear or be heard.

It’s easy to write off entertainment content owners and distributors as a money-grubbing cartel; for the most part, they are. But the technical work they do to protect what they own matters, even that work which we find distasteful given needless extremes of use such as pay-per-single-view. They’ve got the money to drive the science of data and content protection. If they perfect that unbreakable link between the media and the delivery end point, if there’s never another DVD image splattered all over the Internet, then IT will be able to make a promise that, to date, it couldn’t: Nobody can view or copy your data without authorization.

I admit, Schwartz didn't use those exact words when making the announcement in his blog. In fact, Schwartz opens his post by saying, "I'm radically increasing Sun's focus on storage today," which you might take to mean exactly the opposite of what I'm saying, until you get to the next paragraph:

"I'm going to be combining our Storage and Server product teams to create a new converged group at Sun known simply as our 'Systems' team. The Systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage, and networking systems."

That's it. Over. Finito. Sun won't have a storage engineering team separate from server engineering anymore. Does this mean Sun won't continue to sell storage arrays? Of course not; arrays will certainly stick around for a while, thanks to the need to absorb ever higher tides of digital data. But the days of developing storage solutions independently from (or, I'm tempted to say, in opposition to) application servers are gone -- at least at Sun, but other vendors take note.

The convergence of systems and storage is going to change the datacenter landscape dramatically, so you might want to take a good look now, and maybe shoot some pictures. In time, a computer room filled with storage arrays will be as anachronistic as the "disk farm" of time-sharing days.

Schwartz has a point when he says that, looking at a blade system, it's hard to tell where the server part ends and where storage begins. In a future where blade systems are ubiquitous, the distinction between server and storage won't be easy to make.

If blade systems are indeed the future, where does this leave the so-called pure storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, not to mention the hundred or so minor players? Frankly, I don't have a clue.

Depending on how aggressive blade systems vendors become, self-standing storage solutions could hang around for quite some time. Perhaps they'll never quite disappear, but shrink into a market niche of limited relevance.

And if you're thinking that blade systems are for Fortune 500 customers only, think again. Both HP and Sun are reducing the tonnage in entry-level models to make those boats more appealing to a broader market. (See the HP BladeSystem c3000 and Paul Venezia's review of the Sun Blade 6000 for details.) Other vendors will follow, if they haven't already.

Interestingly, even if consolidating servers, switches, host adapters, and disk drives into all-in-one blade systems could be the strategy that wins the datacenter, one piece of the storage puzzle will always remain independent. Tape libraries, because of their very nature, will remain outside, as detached units. Wouldn't it be ironic if the tape drive, a device that has been declared dead so many times by so many experts, were to be the only survivor of the storage years?

Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.

The fact is, if you digitize and archive your voice mails, especially on your e-mail server, you are obligated to save them as you would any other relevant electronic document.

Unified messaging -- strictly speaking, a subset of unified communications -- integrates two or three of the so-called store-and-forward technologies: e-mail, fax, and voice mail. The heart of the problem, according to Bernard Elliot, an analyst at Gartner, is the technology behind the creation of a common UI, as there are a number of ways on the back end to design a single UI for e-mail and voice mail on the front end.

Applied Voice & Speech Technologies (AVST), for example, offers four configurations: server, client, secure, and simplified. All unified communications vendors give you one or more of these options.

AVST’s server configuration stores all messages in the e-mail server. Client keeps voice, fax, and e-mail separate, with unification being performed on the client itself. Secure says, “I do not want voice to ever touch e-mail,” so it keeps the three types of messages separate, offering a Web portal for access. Simplified just sends users an e-mail to notify them of a voice message.

Microsoft stores both voice and e-mail messages on Exchange. Cisco gives the customer two choices. Cisco Unity puts everything on one platform; Unity Connection keeps platforms separate.

Now we come to the problem of electronic discovery.

For the most part, voice mail servers expunge voice mails after two weeks, some after 30 days. Unless you are in the financial services industry, you are not required to maintain voice mails beyond that, according to Trent Dickey, an IP (intellectual property) specialist at the law firm Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross.

However, if your voice mail is archived along with your e-mail, as is the case with Exchange or Unity, the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure considers those voice mails to be documents subject to e-discovery regulations in the event of a lawsuit, says Howard Susser, an attorney and partner in the IP department at Burns & Levinson. Dickey agrees.

Going forward, even if old e-mails were expunged on a regular basis, you may be obligated to save new voice mails that are relevant to an ongoing dispute, Dickey says.

With this in mind, it is important to heed the advice of Gartner's Elliot.

"You have to be careful about the way you deploy unified messaging," Elliot tells me.

If you don't care, you can go to a single store, but if you do, look at client-side integration with completely separate stores. Although it looks like your communications are unified, on the back end they are separate. Yet another approach is a separate-but-synchronized methodology, where there are separate folders but the index is cross-tabulated. Finally, there is a URL-pointer system that directs you to the separate audio file.

Even if you unify voice mail on a different server, if you archive them they are like any other e-document.

If you anticipate a lawsuit, the voice mail must be put on litigation hold. Whereas e-mail can be easily searched for keywords, it is more difficult with voice mail. Someone might have to listen to them all.

New technology always comes with a new set of issues. Unified communications is no different.

SAP trap  Oracle has accused SAP of “corporate theft on a grand scale.” The Ellisonians claim employees of SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow posed as Oracle customers and downloaded some 10,000 proprietary documents and software updates. Henning Kagermann, CEO of the German software giant, denies all charges. Also: There’s no truth to the rumor SAP got caught when its employees tried to swap the materials on a Bitte Torrent network.

Putting the boob back in tube  Media mastodons NBC and Fox hope to cut the legs out from under YouTube by distributing some of their shows for free via AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo. They’re banking that repeats of Cops or Passions will prove more captivating than those sneezing panda videos. Me, I’ve got my money on the bears.

No no, no Net  A Parks Associates survey says roughly a third of American households don't have Internet access and like it that way. The reason? Nearly half of anti-Netters say there’s nothing online worth looking at. (Apparently they haven’t seen the panda videos either.)

Office affairs  In my item on Office 2007 going medieval on Outlook Express's spellchecker, I mistakenly referred to the French language in the feminine and not the masculine. La Belle Francaise actually means “the beautiful French woman.” Cringester Keith U. adds that if I know how to meet beautiful French women using OE, it’s probably an infringement of Microsoft’s IP rights.

Send hot tips or beautiful French women to cringe@infoworld.com and you may receive un beau sac in return.

Now, before we get to those, you're probably wondering who InfoWorld is enlisting to track the Big Red beast. Well, just as Microsoft has told us with Longhorn, we're afraid you'll just have to wait -- though we can assure you that, by next week, we'll have a new, brave soul who is willing to sacrifice his sanity to tracking all the happenings in Redmond.

And without further ado, here are the top eight Microsoft product tests and analyses InfoWorld's done in the past year:

1. Product: Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007
Score: Good, 7.4
Bottom line: SharePoint Server 2007 is a platform that offers amazing new potential to Microsoft Office users, and it does so without loads of new training for IT. However, the platform is so powerful that administrators will need to be careful when planning architecture and hardware distribution, as well as when and in what order they'll roll out certain features.

2. Product: Microsoft Office Groove Server
Score: Fair, 6.8
Bottom line: Office Groove Server 2007 is a platform meant to ease the IT burden of managing 100 or more Office Groove 2007 users. Covering management security and even file transfers as well as communication with back-end line-of-business apps via Web Services, this is one Office Server package that really doesn't need SharePoint.

3. Product: InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007
Score: Good, 7.3
Bottom line: InfoPath 2007 and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise or Forms Server 2007 have enough combined power to truly revolutionize how your company handles forms. From content to display capabilities, the duo handles it all, and it adds security and business intelligence to the mix as well.

4. Product: Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006
Score: Excellent, 8.9
Bottom line: Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 offers strong capabilities to all four key constituencies involved in EAI and b-to-b e-commerce: developers, business analysts, IT professionals, and business users. Although it runs only on Windows servers and requires two other Microsoft products, it can connect to and integrate with a wide variety of databases, Web services, and line-of-business applications.

5. Product: Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Score: Excellent, 9.1
Bottom line: SQL Server 2005 vastly improves capabilities on all fronts, including development, integration, management, and BI. Companies will be able to run safer databases, better manage their environment, and finally create a truly 24/7 operation. Among new high-availability features, partial restores will allow databases to be brought online faster after failures, and database mirroring, although not yet officially supported, will provide automatic fail-over for log shipping scenarios.

6. Preview: Microsoft Exchange 2007
Score: N/A
Bottom line: Overall, Exchange 2007 is a very likable upgrade. The new management interface is somewhat reorganized, and while Microsoft did succeed in making it a mite cleaner overall, the UI most likely won't save you much real time in day-to-day work. The Exchange Management Shell may be worth the upgrade all by itself for some folks. Users may enjoy the benefits of Exchange 2007, as e-mail administrators will. OWA and Windows Mobility both seem like "nice to haves" at first blush, but both have powerful long-term potential. If there's anything we really don't like about Exchange 2007, it has to be the sudden move toward x64-only.

7. Analysis: Deploying Microsoft Office 2007
Score: N/A
Bottom line: Overall, Microsoft has done a decent job anticipating users' Office 2007 deployment needs and providing tools to manage them. Deploying as part of a WIM image is definitely a plus; however, we couldn't edit the customization settings on an existing Office 2007 WIM installation the way we could with Vista. (At least, we couldn't find an easy way to do it.) It's best simply to make a WIM image for largely different Office installations.

8. Analysis: Microsoft tools ease Vista deployment
Score: N/A
Bottom line: The upshot on Microsoft Vista deployment is that it's far and away better than what we had in the box with Windows XP Professional. The company did a solid job addressing the needs of most conventional businesses, but there's definitely room for customization and improvement on the overall smoothness of the operation that third-party desktop management vendors such as Altiris or LANDesk will likely exploit.

Hopefully this look back has proven useful. Stay tuned next week as we resume our in-depth coverage of Microsoft with a fresh new perspective.

Well, guess what? It’s 1999 all over again, and startups are springing up faster than vulnerabilities in a Windows app. Unlike last time, many of these new companies have credible business models plus low overhead, even lower development costs (thanks to commodity hardware, Web 2.0 technologies, and open source) and a thrifty approach to spending. Those attributes should give them legs, even when the inevitable economic crunch descends. So there are suddenly some great jobs to be had, and we’ve got a practical guide on how to get them: “How to get hired by a hot startup”, by Contributing Editor Bill Snyder.

In researching the story, Snyder heard one message over and over again: that managers are looking to hire techies with business chops. “That’s not to say you don’t need hard programming skills,” notes Snyder. “But those are just your ante; a lot of people have them.” Possibly as a response to excesses of the past, today’s startups are lean, and their employees must be capable of wearing many hats. At this new breed of startup, “engineers often need to go out on sales calls,” says Snyder, who also writes InfoWorld’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog. “Software is complicated stuff, involving business processes that need to be understood from both a business and a software-implementation perspective. Who could be better than an engineer at explaining that complexity to laypeople?” he asks.

Bill was surprised at the way his subjects’ excitement and optimism rubbed off on him. “Typically, when I go out on a reporting assignment, after four hours of interviews, I’m exhausted,” he says. “This time, that didn’t happen. These people are enthusiastic about their jobs, about where software and business are going, and about their prospects. That energy level is contagious.”

Smiling for the software
Speaking of things that are contagious, I saw a video last week that proved just how infectious a smile -- even a forced one -- can be. At a recent exhibition in Japan, a company called Omron demonstrated a technology that can evaluate the size of someone’s smile. Omron’s software, if embedded in a digital camera, can be used in numerous scenarios, including training of service employees who need to produce a big, toothy grin on command. Even weirder, though, was the video clip showing a smiling competition, with contestants trying to out-grin one another. Watch it and see if you can avoid grinning ear to ear. I know I couldn’t.

Locate your data. Start by locating your data. It's much harder than it looks. Begin the process by searching for data on your database and file servers. Think of every location where your data can be deposited. Then think of all the ways it can be accessed, downloaded, copied, viewed, and printed. Data can be copied to removable media, including floppies (anyone have those anymore?), CD-ROMs, DVDs, USB drives, and tape. Has data been copied to local hard drives or downloaded to virtual images, laptops, and home computers? The last two locations have ended up in the media way too much lately.

Is information leaving your company via e-mail and other networking methods? If you're not sure, consider using one of the many data leak protection tools available to sniff your traffic looking for confidential data. Every client I've talked to that has used one of these tools said they have been surprised by the amount of unauthorized confidential data leaving their networks. Last year, a CSO friend of mine said it best: "If you think you know where all your data is, you either don't understand the scope of the problem or you're clueless."

Classify data and access. Once you find the data, classify it according to sensitivity, much like the government does with Unclassified, Classified, Secret, and Top Secret classifications. I prefer general labels, such as simple numbers, 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest sensitivity. Define the various sensitivity labels so that everyone classifying data can follow some basic rules when marking the data. When you've finished classifying your data, what mechanisms do you have in place to ensure all future created data is appropriately classified? Now that the data is classified, move to issues of how users get to the information. How is the data accessed? Who is accessing the information and for what purpose? 

Threat model. Model all the possible threats to the data, from internal, unauthorized accesses to external intruders. Threats can be from human beings or malicious mobile code. Don't forget to include natural disasters and other disaster recovery events.