Dell has announced a plan to deliver a digital content management platform for healthcare, file/email archiving and ediscovery in the first half of 2010.

Known as the Dell DX Object Storage Solution, it is designed for scalable SATA repositories containing billions of files or other digital content, whether on premise or in the cloud.

Due for launch in the US in May, and Australia/New Zealand in September, it will incorporate a metadata scheme to add descriptions to digital files, to enhance content management functionality.

Justin Boyd, Dells Server & Storage Marketing Manager (ANZ), said the solution would be deployed as a DX6000 network appliance that would assist with compliance.

"The DX6000 creates a uniquer identifier that gives structure to unstructured data and will assist with organisations looking to design retention policies, and hook into records management platforms."

"In the medical world, if someone puts a text file into the DX6000 it will turn it into an active object and associate that file with patient names," he said.

Boyd also identified the education market and state and local government as a focus for the Dell DX Object Storage Solution.

"We will work with partners in the market today to enable organisations such as universities to tie data back to students."

"This is just one aspect of what Dell is doing around Intelligent Data Management (IDM) solutions."

Dell believes the DX Object Storage Solution provides a platform to reduce data management by 50 percent, and improve governance with automated policy-based retention and deletion.

"The DX Object Storage Solution is self-healing, uses wizard-based setup and does not require LUNs or RAID groups [and] is built on a flexible, peer-scaling architecture using industry standards-based hardware and integrated software in one end-to-end solution," the company said in a statement.

Dell has announced a series of industry software vendors that will work to develop horizontal and vertical solutions around its object platform, using an open HTTP interface that simplifies and minimises the integration effort.

These include CommVault, EMC, Moonwalk, OpenText and Symantec.

Meanwhile, Dell has also introduced new deduplication offerings including an expansion of its relationship with EMC.

Dell also introduced enhancements to its PowerVault DL2100, a new single-system backup-to-disk solution that combines hardware and software from Symantec and CommVault, to help customers store, protect and archive data.

Upgrades to the PowerVault DL2100 Powered by CommVault Simpana 8 can provide application-aware snapshot management and enable Dell PowerVault customers to leverage a secure, cost-effective tier of cloud storage

Dell also announced the PowerVault NX3100 a capacity-dense, dedicated NAS solution to handle multiple data types (block and file) in a single system, built for capacity with up to 24TB internally and up to 384TB externally.