There are a lot of specialized moving parts in data centers that easily can be overlooked in the day-to-day IT news business. Nonetheless, they can be huge contributors to the mission of an IT department inside of an enterprise.
One of these unsung components is the idea of a purpose-built data-collection engine for e-discovery and data analytics. Analytics are becoming increasingly more interesting to IT managers as they discover new ways to use stored, inactive business information for proactive purposes.
For one example, Holmdel, N.J.-based Index Engines demonstrated recently at EMC World in Las Vegas a new package of hardware and software that specifically indexes the content of EMC Data Domain backup images, so that user data can be searched and extracted for business purposes. This makes it possible to report on key business metrics such as customer profiling, buying tendencies, sales projections and others.
Index Engines Collection Engine works with Data Domain deduplication storage systems and uses the existing backup process to automatically identify and extract specific files and email for regulatory, compliance and legal applications, according to predefined policies.
Only a small subset of the data captured in the backup process is of value for long-term access, Jim McGann, Index Engines’ vice president of Information Discovery, told eWEEK. So the data needs to be sorted out in advance as cleanly as possible.
“To filter down the volume of data that is archived, detailed knowledge of the backup images is required. Index Engines Collection Engine automatically indexes backup images, identifies the useful content, collects what is relevant and writes it back to Data Domain storage making it available for compliance and litigation purposes,” McGann said.
Index Engines’ Collection Engine for EMC Data Domain will be available for shipment beginning July 1, McGann said, and it will be priced on a per-user account basis.
Index Engines provides support for accounts in Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and file system data within a single platform with full discovery and archiving capabilities. For 1,000 users, the price is $50 per account, or $50,000 with annual maintenance of 20 percent.