Delivering on its promise to blend content management with storage
management after its purchase of Documentum last year, EMC issued new software Thursday to help companies shuttle data across their computer systems.
EMC’s Documentum Content Storage Services represents the first time a
company has directly spliced software platforms from the enterprise content
management (ECM) and storage management sectors.
That novelty aside, the platform performs an important function, automating
unstructured files, such as e-mail, contracts and purchase orders across
different storage platforms, as the value of that content and business needs
changes.
For example, a business could save money by archiving a seldom-used file,
moving it to lower-cost tape storage based on Serial ATA
keeping frequently used files on more costly disk-based products.
According to John Magee, vice president of product marketing at Documentum,
such data migration is typically done manually and could be a tedious chore
for IT managers pressed for time. Also, with data and record retention regulations to follow, companies that use manual processes could find their shoddy migration work puts them at risk.
Shuttling content automatically will help customers save time and money. The
new software is not relegated to any particular customer class, and may be
used by small companies that need automated rules-based archival, as well as
large enterprises that employ tiered storage to manage unwieldy volumes of
unstructured content.
The product has its roots in a technological concept called hierarchical
storage management (HSM), espoused by IBM, HP and others.
“HSM traditionally operates at a low level, setting policies for tasks at
the file and disk level,” Magee told internetnews.com. “So, you could
write a policy that says when this volume is 80 percent full, let’s migrate
certain file types off to tape or some other platform. That’s useful but the
challenge is it doesn’t go far enough in terms of understanding the
information.”
For example, by bundling content management and its ability to classify and
tag information with storage management, users can discern that a file is
not only
a Microsoft Word document, but more specifically that it is a contract that
has been approved by the sales department but not yet by the legal team.
Software teams from EMC and the Documentum division
spent the last seven months creating Documentum Content Storage Services,
which is a key piece of the company’s information lifecycle management (ILM)
bid. ILM is EMC’s broad strategy for managing the lifecycle of an
organization’s information from its creation to its disposal.
The new software supports all EMC storage platforms, as well as systems from
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), IBM,
HP
and Network Appliance
. Pricing for the
platform depends on individual configurations.
EMC Blending Content, Storage
