When Enron was found to have shredded incriminating documents, it touched
off an avalanche of concern for increased records retention and with it,
created new opportunities for storage-oriented firms to make new products to
address this issue.
EMC Tuesday became the first to tap an
emerging market for records retention products when it released a
specialized content addressed storage (CAS) system designed to meet more
stringent records retention regulations, dubbed EMC Centera Compliance
Edition.
The Hopkinton, Mass.’s firm built the specialized server in it popular
Centera line from scratch to meet the challenges associated with retaining
such content as document images, e-mail, X-rays and medical records. Centera
boxes, which compete with machines such as IBM’s Shark, and Hitachi’s
Freedom and Lightning systems, are considered by analysts to be very
reliable and scale to hundreds of terabytes without requiring additional
management overhead.
Enterprise Storage Group Steve Duplessie acknowledged that minding records
retention regulations “is becoming the hottest issue in IT.” He also
predicted data permanence will be a rule in every IT department.
“As a result, there will be a huge demand for cost-efficient disk-based
systems capable of storing objects permanently, in an unalterable state,”
Duplessie said. EMC Centera is the first such solution, and EMC Centera
Compliance Edition has already proven to meet today’s toughest regulatory
requirements.”
The Centera Compliance Edition includes retention enforcement, which enables
compliance officials to set retention periods on electronic records, and
satisfies regulations such as the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC)
rule that all e-mails must be saved by investment firms and the like for
three years in case they desire to inspect them.
CAS also ensures that deleted data cannot be recovered using disk scanning
tools, pursuant to Defense Department regulations for data destruction.
Lastly, the machine provides application access security, which permits
systems operators to establish access security and authorized activities at
the application or server level, and ensures the privacy of sensitive
records for regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA).
A records retention expert vouched for the importance of such systems.
Robert Williams, president of records management consulting firm Cohasset
Associates, said electronic records management is an important issue IT
firms must address.
Despite the new laws and regulations, Williams said most organizations
cannot access electronic records they created just a few years ago, “much
less demonstrate in a legal proceeding that those records are still
accurate, reliable and trustworthy.”
EMC Centera list price begins at $64,000 for Centera hardware and $84,000
for Centera software. That adds up to $148,000 for system configured with 4
terabytes of storage. Other new Centera features include Content Parity
Protection (CPP) for improved capacity utilization, and enhanced replication
management, which lets users set policies for replicating content.
In related news, EMC also announced early financial results for the first quarter of 2003. EMC expects total consolidated revenue to be within the range of $1.35 billion and $1.4 billion, and earnings per share to be at least $.01 per diluted share — all in line with analyst expectations.
The company will report earnings April 16.
