Network Appliance Loops In ILM Partners

Network Appliance is working with Ixos Software AG and Princeton Softech Inc. in separate deals to combine storage platforms with content management software. The two deals feed NetApp's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy, the hottest three-letter acronym in storage today, which seeks to manage data from creation to deletion under new U.S. and international laws.

By combining Ixos Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite NetApp's SnapLock platform, the two companies said that enterprises could more readily comply with new regulations regarding archiving, reporting and privacy.

SnapLock is a software suite for high performance, high-security data archiving for disk-based storage. Ixos' ECM suite supports the major business applications like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft.

"The breadth of the two offerings enables enterprise customers to consolidate capabilities under one open ILM platform [for] faster data search, retrieval, and replication; and reduce administrative costs and risks," the two companies said in a statement.

With Princeton Softech, NetApp brings SnapLock as well as its NearStorage and FAS to integrate with Princeton's Active Archiving software. Active Archiving handles enterprise-wide archiving for fixed-content database information from Oracle E-Business, PeopleSoft, ClarifyCRM and other applications.The two vendors said that archiving of application-specific structured data residing in enterprise production databases is a critical piece of ILM.