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EMC today added new software solutions for helping customers find, retain and protect data from several digital sources, while rival Hitachi Data Systems rolled out a new unified midrange system to replace the Thunder 9585V.
EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports software were created to help customers search and retrieve information for compliance and legal discovery and content re-use.
Both solutions corral and pinpoint data from e-mail, images, reports, documents, records, videos and even Web sites, said Lubor Ptacek, product director in EMC’s software group.
The products are the next leg of the Hopkinton, Mass., company’s plan to bring technology from its Documentum, Legato and Acartus acquisitions together to provide more sophisticated storage products.
The industry could need them: Enterprise Strategy Group believes organizations will archive some 4,000 petabytes of data in 2006.
Ptacek said EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email blends the Documentum repository software and Legato archiving solution to provide e-mail archiving for large businesses.
To meet compliance guidelines at a time when Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations weigh heavily on CIOs’ minds, the software captures and saves incoming and outgoing e-mail messages.
This product also boasts a message validation to help companies validate their e-mail compliance to regulators and the courts, a key feature should lawyers come calling with subpoenas. Should litigation rear its head, lawyers can search the archive and deliver messages accurately and with assurance that the chain of custody is intact.
The new Documentum service bears resemblance to EMC’s EmailExtender service, a former Legato asset.
But Ptacek said EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email is targeted at customers archiving e-mail and other content types, while EmailXtender strictly archives e-mail.
With such content management and archiving products, EMC’s wish is to one day help customers render content in one common environment.
Ptacek also said EMC will eventually target rich media, such as video libraries and libraries of scanned images, VoIP, video conferencing and surveillance tapes for digitization.
The second new tool, EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports, grabs large volumes of digital reports from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, invoices, statements, bills, wireless devices, debit cards and Web services.
The content is then converted into ISO-standard PDF-A format for long-term preservation, retention policy management and lifecycle-managed storage.
Ptacek said this product, the fruit of EMC’s purchase of Acartus last fall, subsumes legacy reporting systems.
“We can essentially put all of the data into a repository, chunk it into smaller pieces and provide those pieces to managers based on their entitlement,” Ptacek said.
EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports are available, with pricing varying by configuration.
In other EMC news, the company today jazzed up its hardware boxes for small- and medium-sized business, unveiling the Clariion AX150 and AX150i networked storage systems. The new systems, part of EMC’s Insignia line for SMBs, support iSCSI, SATAII disk drives. Both models can be easily installed, and they support up to 10 host servers and scale from 750 gigabytes to six terabytes.
Pricing for the EMC CLARiiON AX150 systems is expected to start at $5,600.
HDS Unifies Storage
Hitachi Data Systems, meanwhile, unveiled a new midrange storage system and software updates.
The Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage model AMS1000 — successor to the Thunder 9585V — offers features such as 32 Logical Cache Partitions, non-disruptive “on-the-fly” data movement across multiple tiers of storage, and fully embedded multi-protocol support for iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel, with no reliance on external servers or adapters.
The AMS1000 offers information lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities in a single box. Users can mix and match multiple tiers of storage in a single rack (including 250GB, 400GB and 500GB SATA HDDs), so online applications demanding the fastest response time can run on high-speed Fibre Channel drives, then data can be easily moved to economical SATA drives for archiving or data mining. The AMS1000 can also serve as externally-attached tiered or archive storage in a virtualized environment managed by the Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform or Network Storage Controller using Hitachi Universal Volume Manager software.
The AMS1000 delivers 13 gigabytes per second of cached bandwidth, full 4Gb/s Fibre Channel connectivity, support for 4,096 LUNs and 16 GigaBytes of cache.
HDS also introduced the HiCommand Suite Version 5.0, featuring the new HiCommand Global Link Availability Manager software, which consolidates under a single, integrated console the management and monitoring of multipath data connections between hosts and storage systems. With this software, storage administrators can manage a nearly unlimited number of separate instances of HiCommand Dynamic Link Manager, Hitachi’s multipathing software, HDS said.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com
