EMC’s new SourceOne solutions aim to ease management of multiple content types, making data consolidation and storage more efficient for solution providers. 

The SourceOne product family will integrate easily with solution providers that have an existing storage practice, or for those who work with customers in the legal, health care, financial or large enterprise sector, says Sheila Childs, director of product marketing, EMC. These solution providers and their customers are under tremendous pressure to ensure the integrity and security of their data, and also to be able to quickly produce it for litigation or compliance purposes, she says.

An effective information management strategy helps solution providers reduce the amount of content their customers store, while increasing integrity and security of that data, says Childs. Making sure that the most important data is correctly stored and accessible can increase organizations’ efficiency and save thousands of dollars, especially if they are subject to e-discovery in the legal arena or must provide data to prove regulatory compliance, she says.

“IT efficiency is so crucial now, and solution providers are focused on leveraging tiered storage, improving information management, performance and data recovery times,” she says. “Our focus in on integrating good information governance into the storage arena, to make sure customers set sound policies around deletion, retention and compliance.”

EMC’s SourceOne family replaces the company’s E-mail Extender product, and is built on entirely new code that integrates with EMC’s Centera content addressed storage and EMC Celerra unified storage systems. EMC SourceOne manages archiving, retention and automates storage tiering to decide which data should live where, improving backup and recovery service levels, Childs says. She adds that the SourceOne product line is hardware-agnostic, and will also integrate with legacy architectures that include products from other storage vendors.

While initially, EMC SourceOne will archive only e-mail and instant messages, support for files, Microsoft SharePoint, enterprise applications XML and other content types will be added in the future. 

“Today, what we see is that e-mail is the No. 1 content type that’s cited for e-discovery, and that’s where we see the highest growth initially,” Childs says. “Eventually, though, we see e-mail being overtaken by data generated from Web 2.0 solutions and applications,” she says.

The SourceOne solution’s unique design operates on a single server for midsize companies and can also scale horizontally across multiple servers to meet the needs of larger enterprise customers. A modular design allows the addition of new data stores and/or backend storage as needed, Childs says.

There are three members to the EMC SourceOne family. EMC SourceOne E-mail Management archives e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino as well as SMTP and instant messages. SourceOne E-mail Management can improve operational efficiency of messaging systems, reduce production, storage and backup costs and enhance message retrieval and system recoveries, says Childs.

EMC SourceOne Discovery Manager provides high volume discovery search and collection for e-mail archived by the SourceOne E-mail Management. It can quickly find, safely hold, efficiently cull and defensibly produce archived e-mail in response to legal or regulatory notice and in compliance with corporate policy.

EMC SourceOne Discovery Collector is an indexing appliance that automates the in-house identification, collection, preservation and policy management of unstructured content that resides “in the wild” on data sources such as desktops, laptops, common Internet file systems (CIFS) and network file systems (NFS), on a NAS, within Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other content management repositories.

EMC SourceOne E-mail Management and EMC SourceOne Discovery Collector are available now. EMC SourceOne Discovery Manager will be generally available in the latter part of this quarter.