EMC, Iron Mountain and startup software company KVS will offer
bundled archiving services to banks and broker/dealers aimed at
addressing pressure on financial services firms to comply with US
government mandates requiring e-mail retention.
The archiving service, which can be installed in-house or
outsourced via a network portal to any of Iron Mountain's data
centres worldwide, includes the use of EMC's Centera server - a
write once, read many array - KVS's Enterprise Vault for Microsoft
Exchange software and Iron Mountain's storage services.
KVS's software provides e-mail mailbox management and compliance
supervision, whereas EMC's Centera array, which gives each object
stored on it a unique identifier, provides long-term online e-mail
archiving and indexing.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission requires firms to store
e-mail traffic, including internal office memos, in original form
for at least three years and have those communications in an
"accessible" place for the first two years.
The National Association of Securities Dealers also requires firms
to monitor and store communications with clients.
"Even in the event of a disaster or an audit, you could have the
third-party source [government] recover e-mails in the same way the
financial service firm can recover it on their site," said Roy
Sanford, vice-president of content-addressed storage at EMC.
Although the idea of hosted storage is not unusual and most leading
storage-management software vendors offer e-mail archival and
search tools, analysts said the packaged services deal by two of
the industry's largest storage vendors is unique.
"It may not necessarily be less costly to choose [this service,
but] there is a lot of value in the fact that it's an integrated
and pretested solution," said Peter Gerr, a research analyst at The
Enterprise Storage Group.
Prices will vary depending on how much storage is required and
whether services are provided in-house or outsourced.
However, a Centera array with 5TBytes of capacity sells for
$205,000 (£124,478), KVS's software for a 10,000-mailbox site costs
in the region of $250,000 (£151,789).
Iron Mountain charges from $30,000 (£18,215) to $40,000 for basic
auditing and storage services for the first year and a half. The
suppliers said those retail prices are a good starting point in
figuring what their combined services would cost retail.