Headline

August 15th, 2006: New Migration and Retention Management Software Provides Customers with Automation and Scalability for Tiered Storage and Compliance Needs.

Enterprises continue to battle with the fundamental problems of the escalating costs and risks associated with unstructured data, which is stored enterprise wide. Customers are at risk of having no visibility into the content of the data and, by default, the potential legal, compliance, or privacy implications associated with the "unknowns."

Network Appliances (NetApp) has extended the functionality of the Information Server 1200 (IS1200) to provide customers with a solution that not only provides granular visibility into the content of unstructured data, but also automates business policy around compliance and litigation through transparent data migration and storage consolidation in a tiered storage infrastructure. NetApp introduced two new software modules for the IS1200 system-the NetApp Transparent Migration Manager and the NetApp Retention Manager-which proactively discover and manage files to meet compliance, legal discovery, and corporate data retention needs. The software is designed specifically for helping enterprise data centre customers optimise their storage utilisation based on business policy and compliance needs.

The introduction of these two software modules further enhances NetApp offerings for information management and delivers a sophisticated solution for managing unstructured data.

Transparent Migration Manager and Retention Manager allow customers to incorporate transparent visibility into their unstructured data environments with business policy automation to seamlessly migrate data between tiered storage and to set and manage retention policies for compliance on disk-based WORM (write once read many) storage, leveraging NetApp SnapLock(r) software.

"This announcement is about NetApp providing customers with a holistic solution to help them gain control over escalating costs and risks associated with unstructured data," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Alliances at Network Appliance. "With this software introduction, we are extending our portfolio of solutions to help customers reduce the amount of time normally required to manage compliance-related storage management tasks and tiered storage migration."

Transparent Migration Manager migrates data from primary to secondary or function-specific storage (e.g., compliance-specific storage) based on user-specified data asset parameters such as staleness, type of content, etc. This means that storage is used in the most cost-effective manner, helping customers to control the costs associated with storage growth and backup. The software automatically manages the migration, screening and restoration of data while making the entire process transparent to users.

Retention Manager identifies data assets that may require WORM storage for regulatory compliance by user-specified content inspection, such as files that contain credit card details, private customer information. The software automatically copies such data to NetApp SnapLock software and sets customer policy-based retention periods. This drastically reduces the time required to identify and deal with compliance-related data and helps eliminate any potential human error in the process. Once data is stored, users can search and instantly access data residing in SnapLock volumes for any audit and/or legal discovery.

The new software, combined with the IS1200 and SnapSearch, mark a total of four product offerings resulting from the NetApp OEM relationship with Kazeon.

Comment on this story.