StorageTek Readies Compliance Appliance

StorageTek 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.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web