If you're drowning now, point solutions like e-mail archiving applications can give you a little breathing room while ensuring you can meet regulatory requirements. Over the next two to three years, a new generation of file-management systems, including classification and migration services, will emerge from vendors such as Acopia Networks, Brocade Communications Systems, NeoPath Networks, Njini, and EMC as it integrates Infoscape with Rainfinity.
Ideally, these vendors will realize the bulk of e-mail archive space is taken up by attachments that also exist in file systems and give IT a way to integrate these archives. In "Your Money or Your Data," we tested products that claim to classify unstructured file data using detailed, flexible criteria and migrate files or provide an interface to a separate data-migration engine. See page 46 for a summary; the complete product review is at nwcreports.com.
Finally, managing structured data will always be dependent not only on the database server environment, but on the application's database schemas and utilizations. As a result, point products that are application-aware will work substantially better than any integrated solution. Princeton Softech's Optim and Solix Technologies' ArchiveJinni, for example, have modules and policies for apps like PeopleSoft and Oracle financials.
Pony Up
Getting an ILM project off the ground takes a significant commitment in both time and money. From a labor perspective, ILM is, first and foremost, a policy issue. Before ILM tools can automate the process of finding data and moving it to appropriate storage, correspondingly appropriate retention policies must be set. The file-classification software we reviewed can help here, but because they're limited to keywords and metadata, they won't automatically make the contextual distinctions we hope tomorrow's offerings will.
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