I'm stoked. Yesterday Dell EqualLogic announced Exchange integration with the Auto Snapshot Manager for PS series iSCSI SAN arrays. The Smart Copy for Exchange functionality joins the Smart Copy for SQL Server functionality that we already have in the product.
Smart Copy is crash-consistent, application-aware data protection. A quick explanation of how it works is in Darren Miller's discussion of VDS/VSS integration in this blog post from a couple weeks ago. Exchange admins are going to like this for the flexibility and time savings it has. Smart copy for Exchange is a storage software power tool that will make backups, recoveries, remote replication, backup validation and volume cloning much easier.
Of course, one of the best things about it is that it will be available to our customers as a free download as part of a new release of our Host Integration Toolkit (we call it the hit kit), to be released in May. If this isn't the best deal in storage software I don't know what is. Customers get incredible software without having to make an additional purchase and the technical support behind it is excellent.
Also yesterday, Lucid8 announced a new Outlook snap-in that allows end users to restore deleted mailbox and item data that resides on PS Series snapshots – without having to bug admins for help. How cool is that? Years ago when I worked at Palindrome we developed end user restores of files from data stored in tape libraries. This is much more useful because email discovery is becoming such a common occurrence. Things just keep coming together.