Regulations Spur Storage Updates

Compliance with new federal e-mail archiving regulations and the safeguarding of information from equipment failures are key goals of new products and partnerships due from storage industry leaders this summer.

Quantum Corp. has plans, for example, to add 2G-bps support to its high-end P4000 and P7000 series of libraries, available this month, and release an external Fibre Channel-to-SCSI bridge called X-bridge, due later this year.

Quantum also plans to bundle the DX-30 disk-based backup appliance with the P series, to be called P/DX and due June 16, according to Lynne VanArsdale, enterprise product line manager at the tape and disk backup maker, in Irvine, Calif.

In software, Quantum later this summer will launch a utility for managing multiple libraries simultaneously, integrated with Computer Associates International Inc.s Unicenter, Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView and Veritas Software Corp.s SAN Manager suites, VanArsdale said. By fall, the as-yet-unnamed tool will also work with the evolving Common Information Model, she said.

Document management specialist Iron Mountain Inc. next quarter will begin selling a branded version of Legato Systems Inc.s EmailXtender product to add policy management to Iron Mountains e-mail archiving services, said Jim Cuff, vice president of engineering, in Boston.

Iron Mountain is adding policy management to its other services through a new product called Iron Mountain Connect, also due next quarter. That will build on Oracle Corp. metadata applications and full-text indexing to give customers a universal index of any archived file.

Legato, for its part, last week announced that DiskXtender and EmailXtender will be resold by HP. In that deal, HP will apply the software to all its storage hardware, said company officials, in Palo Alto, Calif. EmailXtender will get a major upgrade later this year with more policy-making features for clients, application integration and distributed servers.

Officials declined to comment on whether HP will eventually acquire Legato, which has long been for sale. But the Mountain View, Calif., backup vendors situation is "very compelling," said HP Vice President and General Manager of Storage Software Mark Sorenson.

The new products come as enterprises increasingly deal with dozens of overlapping and at times vague new rules regarding data backup, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Securities and Exchange Commission rules, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.