StorageTek Readies Compliance Appliance

StorageTek has released a hardware system to help customers corral and quickly retrieve files to meet government and regulatory compliance rules.

Tailored but not limited to financial services outfits, the Lifecycle Fixed Content Manager 100 (LFCM) is the first of what will be a series of increasingly advanced compliance systems that help businesses house data and rapidly recall it, said Harvey Andruss, product manager for the Louisville, Colo., company.

This is handy in litigation scenarios, particularly when documents are subpoenaed for court. In one example, Andruss said a financial services company was on the hook with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a multi-million-dollar fine for breaching the SEC 17a-4 record retention mandate.

The firm had an out: If it complied by January 2005, the cost of the fine would be reduced by 80 percent. Andruss said the firm appealed to StorageTek, which teamed with an enterprise content management software maker on a hardware/software bundle. The LFCM 100 was up and running by December 2004, saving the business millions.

Such stories give hope to organizations on the hook for records retention, including retail, health care and other vertical industries. They also inspire data management and storage vendors to craft reliable products capable of isolating a handful of files out of millions.

This is why the LFCM 100 is in keeping with an industry trend toward helping corporations not only store data, but discover and pull files, such as e-mail, x-rays or even video clips from vast repositories within minutes. With the LFCM 100, Andruss said StorageTek aims to duke it out with storage system vendors EMC, IBM and HDS for placement among large enterprises.

Compliance via e-mail archiving is proving to be a lucrative market because of the growing glut of e-mail. IDC said sales of e-mail archiving applications are expected to top $180 million worldwide in 2004, up from just $33 million two years ago. IDC expects revenue in this space to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 50 percent through 2008.

Available now, LFCM 100 prevents the alteration or deletion of data for as long as a business needs, working with most content management software applications. This includes products from Commvault, iLumin and IXOS.

LFCM uses standard NFS and CIFS file interfaces to read and write data and to set retention periods. The product costs $74,000 for a basic system, including 2.3 terabytes of capacity, but it scales in two terabyte increments. For example, the system is $191,000 for 9.2TB and $435,000 for 18.6TB.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com