Content-savvy storage
EMC announces the new EMC Documentum Content Storage Services (DCSS), designed to help customers derive higher levels of business value from their information life cycle management (ILM) strategies.
DCSS enables organizations to define and execute storage policies that automate the placement and movement of content across a tiered, heterogeneous storage infrastructure, reports Documentum. Using the technology, new content can be automatically placed on the optimal storage platform and migrated when the value of that content and related business needs change. As a result, Documentum Content Storage Services helps organizations meet information access, retention and compliance requirements, while consistently storing information in the most cost-effective manner.
The offering is said to be the first and only storage-aware enterprise content management solution designed specifically to enable organizations to adopt an information life cycle management strategy, thereby maximizing the value of content, at the lowest total cost of ownership, at every point in the information life cycle. The new offering supports all EMC storage platforms, as well as arrays from other vendors, including Hitachi, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Network Appliance.
EMC says DCSS is designed for organizations of all sizes and varying degrees of IT complexity, from small companies that need automated rules-based archival to large enterprises that have embraced tiered storage due to increasing volumes of unstructured content and escalating storage costs. DCSS allows automatic storage allocation and enables users to align service levels with the changing business value of content, thereby reducing the cost of unneeded access speeds and uptime without sacrificing performance, data protection or compliance to minimize storage costs. Documentum further says DCSS can eliminate the problems associated with manual, error-prone processes for content archival, which can result in unnecessary and potentially costly exposure to risk, unintended content deletion and noncompliance.
DCSS allows information to be allocated to and migrated across storage devices based on business policies that utilize standard and user-defined attributes, including content type, access control level, life cycle state, sharing permissions, industry regulations or archiving requirements, as well as date last accessed, size, related transactions or related documents. Together, storage administrators and business users work to define policies that specify the initial storage device/tier and rules for migrating information across storage tiers. Policies can be executed automatically as a result of a system event (such as the completion of a workflow activity), ad hoc and in batch to provide the greatest level of flexibility for an organization to optimize utilization. DCSS also includes migration logs and audit trail capabilities so that content movement among storage tiers can be monitored and internal accounting charge backs easily reported, says Documentum.
The company explains DCSS differs from hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions that store information based on standard file or disk-level information by providing allocation and migration of information based on all of the rich metadata and content services provided by the EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management Platform. DCSS can be used to complement and extend HSM solutions to provide even greater value to organizations that have existing HSM investments.