EMC announces content archiving, e-discovery applications

EMC Corp. today announced a new family of e-mail archiving and e-discovery applications that can centrally managing multiple content types in order to apply consistent retention, disposition and overall lifecycle management regardless of the hardware platform.

Initially, EMC is announcing three products aimed at e-mail archiving and discovery, but more content archiving and discovery products will follow over the next 12 to 18 months, said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer for the company's Content Management and Archiving Division.

Tidmarsh said part of the problem with the way archiving has been done to date is that each application or information source tends to have its own archive repository and archive rules, and some support retention management, while others don't. For example, SAP application data and e-mail documents have separate archiving utilities.

“So there's a siloed approach that's inconsistent from application to application,” Tidmarsh said. “While to an extent that's been effective, times have changed. There's a very distinct pressure on IT to reduce cost.”

EMC claims SourceOne users can save more than 50% in total cost of ownership, and ROI in as little as 12 months by reducing e-mail kept on primary storage systems, redundant attachments and lengthy, manual discovery processes.

Tom Leizear, director of IT at Access Intelligence LLC, a publishing and marketing firm, said his company is currently using SourceOne Email Management and in the first 40 days of production deployment, “we saw a 66% reduction in mailbox size.”

“In addition, we were able to reduce backup and recovery time from two and a half hours to 30 minutes,” he added.

While EMC's e-mail archiving and ediscovery products are not unique among competitors such as Symantec's Enterprise Vault, Mimosa Systems' NearPoint, HP's Integrated Archive Platform and Atomomy's Zantaz product, the SourceOne products do have the advantage of being created from a green field.

“They didn't have the burden of legacy products,” said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “I've been following the e-mail archive market for a while and there's a lot of applications out there that have simply aged. EMC took tool a little longer than it probably would have liked to have, but it redesigned the e-mail archive architecture to meet the requirements that have evolved over the last four or five years.”

The three new applications are:

SourceOne Email Management archives e-mail from Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino environments as well as SMTP and instant messages. The application will also introduce single instancing of e-mail attachments to reduce storage capacity requirements in an average enterprise by as much as 60% by creating a single copy of an attachment for users to retrieve.

The application provides full international support and offers a localized interface in seven languages – French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese and simplified Chinese. SourceOne Discovery Manager is an e-mail discovery search engine and collection for e-mail archived by the SourceOne Email Management for legal review. It finds and then puts on hold e-mail for legal or regulatory notices or corporate policy complaints. Discovery Manager supports secure authorized investigator access, defensible collection results and chain of custody. Discovery Manager provides full international support and offers a localized interface in four languages – French, Italian, German and Spanish.

SourceOne Discovery Collector is an indexing appliance that automates the in-house identification, collection, preservation, and policy management of unstructured content that resides on desk tops, laptops, common Internet file systems (CIFS) and network file systems (NFS), networked attached storage, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other content management repositories.

Pricing for the SourceOne family of e-mail archiving and discovery applications are based on a per-mail box model. Tidmarsh said licenses for 1,000 mailboxes will be just under $50,000.