Startup Kazeon Inc. has made good on its promise to launch an unstructured data search and management tool this year. And in the process, it's nabbed a plum partner in Network Appliance Inc. (See NetApp, Kazeon Sign OEM.) But a big name may not be enough to make Kazeon a data center favorite.
Kazeon's IS1200 is one of several appliances that are emerging to help IT pros manage unstructured data, including mountains of email, Excel charts, Office documents, and other paper trail markers that must now be ready to hand for many companies.
Kazeon's software, mounted on a single-unit rackmounted Xeon-based box, peers into the contents of Windows or Unix files to create searchable metadata. Once searched out, a file can automatically be assigned to specific locations in a tiered-storage setup.
Though Kazeon's IS1200 is available now starting at $50,000, NetApp won't resell it until November 7, 2005. NetApp's also not giving out a date for the second phase of its agreement, which involves NetApp OEMing and rebranding the Kazeon product.
These details don't bother Michael Dooley, senior director of IT at Zoran Corp. His team was so eager for a solution to the problem of searching legal files that they grabbed at Kazeon when the startup approached them. Big NetApp hardware users, Zoran hadn't found a comparable search tool from its email archiving supplier Veritas (which bought KVS last year). (See No Brainer: Veritas Buys KVS.) Word that Kazeon could help and that the startup had an imminent partnership with NetApp, was enough. No other wares were sampled.
