Bank rejects EMC, HP and NetApp
Bank rejects EMC, HP and NetApp
A US bank has rejected EMC, HP and NetApp and has selected Permabit Inc.'s compliance and storage software instead to make sure if falls in line with stringent regulations.
Northwest Securities Corp. is a regional investment bank with about US$10 billion of assets. It has to meet the requirements of SEC rule 17 a-4, which involves the retention of all electronic data, including emails and instant messages.
The ruling demands that information must be kept in its original form, in media which cannot be overwritten or erased and it must be indexed for retrieval, with duplicate copies available and kept in the record of the index. Each step must also be audited too.
HP was rejected because it only had basic indexing and was not considered to be scalable enough. HP suggested that the company should buy another jukebox to make up for this. This advice was not received well by the company.
Staff at Northwest Securities complained of the impracticalities of having to keep on replacing disks each time they needed to do an archive and they considered the retrieval of data to be under par. The company said that the HP system made it difficult to find data on one person spread across 20 different disks because the process took so long.
Northwest Securities complained that the EMC Centera product was too expensive and offered nothing less than 4TB, although the company only wanted 1TB. EMC apparently would only offer 4TB for the fixed price.
In addition, the company said that Centera was slow at retrieving information and took several seconds to find one email, which caused a problem when the company was trying to retrieve thousands of emails.
NetApp's FAS 270 filer was found to have faults with the redundancy and failover facilities.
The company eventually chose the Permabit compliance device and archiving software from iLumin Software Services Inc. because the combination allowed it to index, store, audit and retrieve all emails within the legal requirements far more cheaply and efficiently than the offerings.
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