EMC Integrates Archiving, E-Discovery, Compliance in New Product Line

EMC this week is introducing a new archiving product that is integrated with e-discovery and compliance capabilities to help enterprises better manage growing volumes of email and instant messaging and apply policies for retention, disposition, and legal and regulatory requirements. SourceOne will be delivered as a software-hardware appliance later this year and EMC plans to upgrade it over the next two to 18 months to handle content from a wider variety of applications.

EMC said it built SourceOne from the ground up with a modular architecture to allow it run on a single server and later expand to handle the demand of large enterprises. It includes some features and capabilities from the company's high-end Documentum content management software, and can be packaged with the company's Centera content-addressed storage and Celerra unified storage systems.

Elements of the suite include SourceOne Email Management, which collects and archives email from Exchange, Notes/Domino, and SMTP; instant messages; SourceOne Discovery Manager, which finds content on servers through a search and collection process; and SourceOne Discovery Collector, an indexing appliance. It also includes data de-duplication capabilities and single-instance storage to reduce storage needs. Collector automatically finds unstructured content on desktops, laptops, and Internet and network file systems, Exchange, SharePoint, and other locations and collects, preserves, and applies policies to that content. Discovery Manager is designed to find and move specific content to an archive for legal and regulatory purposes and can provide chain of customer documentation.

EMC will be adding support for SharePoint, XML, file archives, data archives, SAP, imaging, reports, documents, and other content over the next year or two, according to Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer in the content management and archiving division of EMC.

"We are trying to change the traditional way of archiving, where each application had its own archiving and search and access tools. E-discovery is forcing companies to change the way they handle and archive their data and we think we can reduce the cost and simplify the administration of storage by offering a single point of management and discovery," says Tidmarsh. "On average, companies are reporting a 50 percent savings versus doing nothing."An early user of the product -- Access Intelligence, an information and marketing company headquartered in Rockville, Md. -- has been able to reduce email mailbox size by 66 percent and cut backup and recovery time from two and a half hours to 30 minutes with the SourceOne Email Management product, according to Tom Leizear, director of IT at the company.

Tidmarsh says the majority of companies may not need the Discovery Manager, at least not until they get involved in more legal and regulatory cases. The Discovery Collector/Email Management package will sell for $30 per mailbox.

Brian Babineau, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, says EMC is making a smart move to offer a new email archiving product with additional features to broaden its appeal. E-discovery is a growing market and by adding those capabilities, EMC is helping "corporate counsel and litigation support specialists manage e-mail -- the most commonly requested source of electronic evidence according to our research."

EMC is one of the few vendors with the resources to build a new application (Discovery Manager), integrated with another app (Discovery Collector), and add them to a revamped third app (E-mail Management) and offer it as a suite, Babineau says. "Yes, it took them a while and customers will let us know if it is worth the wait, but it is a commendable effort to try and tackle all of these challenges in a single development cycle," he says.

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