IBM on Wednesday introduced storage and software to help companies meet government mandates in healthcare, financial services, and other industries.
The Armonk, N.Y., company calls its offerings the Risk and Compliance Framework, which IBM hopes will attract companies wrestling with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Basel II, and other regulations that require retention of data for specific periods of time.
For holding data, IBM offers the TotalStorage DR550, which is powered by IBM's Power5 processor and stores up to 56 terabytes of data. The system is managed through IBM's Tivoli Data Storage for Data Retention software. Pricing for the IBM TotalStorage DR550 starts at $81,123, and ships in November. The IBM Bank Data Warehousing Software is available as of 10/29
Also part of the framework is an enhanced TotalStorage tapeline that supports attaching the IBM 3494 B10 and B20 Virtual Tape Server models to the IBM TotalStoage 3592 Tape Drive. This enables long-term data archival.
The compliance-geared storage fits IBM's strategy of providing technology that can manage data from its creation to the time it can be disposed. Other companies that have similar strategies for information lifecycle management include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and StorageTek.