The storage industry is set to offer a host of products
during 2005 to help users tackle data regulations and develop
strong business continuity plans.
Throughout 2004 suppliers focused on products to support these
demands through a concept dubbed information lifecycle management
(ILM). This trend is expected to continue during 2005.
According to storage analyst Macarthur Stroud International, a
company’s ILM strategy is put to test when systems fail. ILM also
supports the demands of compliance, proving that the organisation
has a set of clear policies and practices defining how information
is managed from creation through to archive and deletion.
"ILM is necessary for a range of reasons including sound
information management to support the needs of corporate
governance," said Hamish Macarthur, chief executive and founder of
Macarthur Stroud International.
Storage suppliers EMC and Veritas are both enhancing their ILM
products to improve business continuity.
Veritas has unveiled its Windows Data Protection strategy, which
provides medium-sized firms with an integrated suite of data
back-up and recovery tools.
The company launched Backup Exec 10, the latest version of its
back-up and restore suite, which will feature the fastest
disc-based recovery of all its products, and high-performance
protection of Linux servers, according to Veritas. It also has
a new central administration server option and policy-based disc
back-up, said Adrian Groeneveld, EMEA product and solutions
marketing manager at Veritas.
"Large customers such as Marks & Spencer and Microsoft are
already using Veritas in the datacentre. We wanted to give
medium-sized customers the ability to back-up data faster with
better management," he said.
Veritas has also launched Storage Exec 5.3, which has a new
feature that reports on type of data and its storage
requirements.
Meanwhile, EMC and Cisco announced an end-to-end storage
consolidation platform for remote-office data. It uses Cisco wide
area file services (WAFS) technology and EMC NAS, with the idea
being to consolidate branch-office data into the datacentre, so
that company-wide data can be centrally stored and managed.
EMC said it would detail its new recovery management strategy at
the end of the month. The strategy is expected to include two new
products designed to help small and medium-sized businesses improve
their corporate security and disaster recovery procedures.
ONStor offers scalable NAS
Storage supplier ONStor has unveiled a scalable "Bobcat" network
attached storage (NAS) gateway that can scale its capacity from
1Tbyte to 40,000Tbytes. prices start at £10,000.
Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said,
"NetApp and, to some degree EMC, have very little competition in
the NAS market. ONStor shakes things up because it can challenge
these two major players with an extremely competitive product that
has been designed for bread-and-butter NAS applications."