EMC Corp. is leveraging its Legato and Documentum divisions to build tightly knit hardware, software and services packages to help guide customers through a minefield of growing data retention and e-mail archiving compliance concerns.

The EMC Proven preconfigured and tested bundles will relieve enterprise customers of the burden of figuring out where in the various tiers of their storage architectures to keep data so that it complies with government regulations, officials said.

At its EMC Forum customer event in New York this week, EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., will introduce three such packages. Two EMC Proven CARS (Content Archiving and Retrieval Solutions) bundles manage document archiving. The EMC Proven Solutions for E-mail Archiving package manages electronic messages.

The messaging product lets EMC hardware users take advantage of the ability of Legato EmailXtender to archive and retrieve e-mail content from Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange and IBM's Lotus e-mail environments.

The CARS with Documentum offering integrates the Documentum Enterprise Content Management software with EMC's SAN (storage area network), NAS (network-attached storage) and content-addressed storage devices. This ensures, among other things, that high-priority data or a large volume of imaging content is immediately and easily accessible on high-performance storage, while archived content in lower demand is sent to EMC Centera disk arrays for long-term retention. The CARS with Mobius package offers similar software capabilities plus a direct connection from the mainframe to Centera arrays for users of Mobius Management Systems Inc.'s content management tools.

Also at the event, EMC will unveil CentraStar Version 2.3 software for its Centera Compliance Edition disk array. The upgrade provides new capabilities for automating compliance with data retention and deletion policies.

EMC's goal with the EMC Proven bundles is to convince customers to invest in a multitier compliance approach that includes hardware and software offerings from a single vendor rather than relying on outsourced or multivendor implementations.

EMC user Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Boston-based Harvard Medical School and CareGroup Healthcare System, said he sees the value of the EMC Proven bundles.

"Don't assume when you buy a server from IBM, software from BEA [Systems Inc.] and storage from EMC [that] the vendors will get together to solve a problem—because it doesn't happen," Halamka said.

eWEEK.com Senior Editor David Morgenstern says the new Proven bundles are no slam dunk for EMC. Click here to read his column.

Some IT managers are going to the opposite extreme by outsourcing all e-mail management to companies such as Zantaz Inc. The Pleasanton, Calif., company will expand its hosted suite this week with Hosted Exchange Archive Solution, which gives customers the option of choosing Zantaz for an on-site or hosted deployment for e-mail management, storage and data search.

Joe Gawronski, chief operating officer of brokerage company Rosenblatt Securities Inc., said his company gets several benefits from using FivePoints Compliance Inc.'s ComplyPoint service for hosted e-mail and instant messaging archiving. He added that he'd like to use the FivePoints model to outsource more data storage.

"Not just for storage but for business continuity purposes, I'd rather have all that data at outside facilities," said Gawronski in New York. "Our IT guys have to focus on making sure our clients are being served. We don't want them to have to spend time on compliance issues for storing and archiving."

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