Documentum Does ILM

For all its talk about Information Lifecycle Management, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has been missing a major piece of that strategy: the ability to easily move data according to its business value.

Now, EMC says it's filling that gap, though it's clearly just a start.

The EMC Documentum Content Storage Services (CSS) product, announced today, automates the movement of unstructured content across different storage platforms as the value of the data changes.

By providing automation, CSS tackles a problem central to ILM -- the need to manually move data from one place to another. Today, ILM is theoretically the ability to transfer data across different storage tiers, depending on how often that data needs to be accessed. For example, when an insurance policy is activated, that document needs to go from nearline storage to high-availability storage. Or a document that needs to be kept for compliance must be archived at a certain point. The goal is to make it happen without involving human beings.

CSS is among the first products to provide automated ILM capabilities across a wide range of storage platforms. Its main element is a new policy engine that lets users determine where and when their data moves -- the essence of any ILM strategy. CSS also includes policy creation and management tools for defining and changing content storage policies, plus an audit tool and migration logs.