EMC targets ILM with Infoscape

Storage giant EMC has introduced a new software product, called Infoscape, which aims to help companies discover, categorise and manage unstructured documents held on file servers as part of their wider information lifecycle management (ILM) initiatives.

The product combines technologies from three of the company’s major software acquisitions – Documentum and Legato in 2003; and Smarts in 2005. Features include file discovery by accepting mass metadata transfers from EMC Celerra network attached storage (NAS) devices; file classification based on metadata or file content; mapping storage-level service to each file type; automated file movement between network shares and storage servers; and audit trails on where information resides.

“Many companies struggle to determine which unstructured information is critical to their business and which is not. Using an automated approach to identify and classify this information will take much of the pain out of ILM,” says David Gingell, vice president of marketing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for EMC Software.

This is, however, a first-generation product and potential buyers should be aware of some of its limitations. At present, for instance, Infoscape can only identify unstructured files in Microsoft environments (and not structured data or even semi-structured e-mails). And the ability to move files automatically to different storage ‘tiers’ is possible only across EMC Celerra NAS servers. Infoscape also comes with a hefty price tag: the base Infoscape software module starts at $125,000 and capacity licensing starts at $9,000 per terabyte.

www.emc.com