Looking to improve its offerings for preserving data cost-effectively, EMC
has refreshed its Centera line by reworking the archiving
software so it can be accessed by disparate platforms.
The Centera Universal Access (CUA), a software appliance unveiled today,
supports non-integrated applications built on Windows, Linux, Unix and IBM’s
iSeries platforms. It helps IT managers store and retrieve fixed files and
addresses the mix of applications customers use. CUA, which can manage 100
million files and holds 350 gigabytes of local cache, receives content from
an application and stores and manages it.
Previous versions of Centera, including a hardware device called Centera
Application Gateway (CAG), supported CIFS
environments. CUA supports those as well as HTTP
Such support broadens the product’s appeal, according to
Eric-Jan Schmidt, director of product marketing for Centera.
“It allows our customers to standardize on Centera and deploy it as a core
enterprise archive solution for pretty much any application, data type of
platform these days,” Schmidt told internetnews.com.
The software, which sits in a Centera cabinet, is also ideal for Centera
customers with in-house legacy or smaller applications.
Centera Universal Access is available in three models: Basic; Retention
Support, which supports Centera Compliance edition; and Enhanced
Availability, which allows two CUAs to work with one another in case one
fails. The Basic product starts at $15,000, while pricing for Retention
Support and Enhanced Availability depends on customer need.
CUA is not entirely homegrown. Schmidt said the product has its roots in a
storage software company EMC quietly bought last November, called Storigen
Systems. After rolling its intellectual assets into its software portfolio,
EMC released CAG as a hardware product. The software-based CUA is a natural
evolution of CAG, Schmidt said.
Managing fixed content storage, which needs to be stored and retrieved with
ease and precision, is one of the many goals of EMC’s information lifecycle
management strategy for shepherding
info from cradle to grave.
Such methods are being espoused by analysts and experts in the wake of the
passage of compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and SEC
17a-4. But ILM is also important because the amount of data that needs to be
stored is growing exponentially.
EMC’s chief competitors HP , IBM
and
Hitachi Data Systems have all taken up some form of ILM
strategy to accommodate the raft of data and rules.
In related Centera news, connectivity provider Bus-Tech said it has enhanced
The Mainframe Appliance for Storage (MAS) for
Centera with FICON
emulates IBM tape drives, allowing those applications using tape to be
upgraded by writing data to Centera instead, with little disruption.
EMC Centera Savors Melting Pot of Platforms
