EMC, HP, IBM Roll Out Content Management Wares

The key suppliers of storage hardware and software are marching aggressively into enterprise content management, an emerging area that is seen as a future complement to storage solutions. EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM are rolling out new versions of their enterprise content-management wares, while Veritas last fall signaled its entry into a segment of the content-management space when it acquired KVS, whose software lets customers search Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail regardless of the tier of storage it resides on.

It seems the flagship storage players are looking not only to offer tools to store and archive data, but to make it recoverable by administrators and individual end users. Content- management systems make it possible to search and retrieve data regardless of where it is stored. As part of this, storage vendors are moving toward a common repository and APIs that transcend specific data stores.

While the latest crop of enterprise content-management systems integrates disparate repositories, the technology is still in the early adopter phase but one that many VARs believe will take off during the next few years.

"Like anything else, you have to prove it in a small way before you take it to the streets for everybody," says Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation, a San Diego-based storage integrator.

Indeed, looking at content management from an enterprise perspective may still be a tough sell because customers remain skeptical, says Jim Geis, director of storage solutions for Forsythe Technology, a Skokie, Ill.-based solution provider that carries EMC, IBM and HP's lines. "Customers are still a little leery, since that marketplace is so new," Geis says. "Customers have more immediate issues they have to address and they still want to see how these technologies shake out. No one wants to buy the first model year of a new car. We are a ways before we will have the ability to manage the enterprise with a single enterprise content-management tool."

Nonetheless, there's growing interest in content management at the departmental and business unit levels. And clearly, many EMC partners, including Forsythe, have added Documentum to their offerings since EMC acquired the company for $1.7 billion.

The intersection of content management and storage is due to several factors, notably regulatory-compliance demands and customers' increasing need to distribute stored data. As more information is digitized, finding and accessing that data becomes ever more critical. Furthermore, content management is regarded as a key component of information life-cycle management (ILM), which is the lifespan of data creation, access and archiving that storage vendors claim will drive data-management processes.

Which discipline is pulling the other along is up for debate: Some argue that the availability of new enterprise content-management tools requires companies to build new storage infrastructures, others say the practice of tiering storage requires companies to deploy content-management tools suited toward helping users retrieve data from various subsystems.

The belief that the trend will drive storage requirements led EMC to acquire Documentum two years ago. HP has made its share of acquisitions on the content-management field, including Persist, among others. Storage integrators must either learn a new discipline or partner with experts in content management.

Among the latest new content-management apps, EMC is calling its new release the Documentum Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, which provides a unified architecture for all functions within the Documentum suite, says Lubor Ptacek, EMC's director of product marketing. Most notably, the new release has a common repository, API and object model, and as a result, simplifies some key functions, but most important, provides a single way of searching multiple systems. "That's significant," Ptacek says, "because managing those separate silos is a large effort."

New to the Documentum suite is federated search, which will make it possible to search multiple data sources, both within Documentum and other data sources, including those offered by FileNet, Open Text and SAP.

EMC also has rolled out the Documentum Client for Outlook. With this, Outlook users will be able to save attachments more intuitively into the Documentum repository.

To simplify the movement of data to the Documentum repository, the new Documentum Content Transformation Services provides a wizard to transform typical desktop file types and rich media into the Documentum format.

Also new is collaboration services, allowing users to conduct discussions, set up workspaces and establish policy management, retention policy services for establishing procedures for retaining documents, e-mail and other data, and trusted content services, which provides a common security model and audit trail.

Also looking to forge into content management, HP a year ago rolled out its Reference Information Storage System, or RISS, an API that integrates storage, archiving and searching with database and server applications. The API is designed to support rapid development of applications that require the above-mentioned information life-cycle management functions. The API will include support for Web services, support for key Internet and file systems CIFS and NFS, and connectors to key vertical market schemas.

The newest release, RISS v1.1, more than doubles the capacity of so-called "Smart Cells" from 400 GB to 850 GB, while HP has cut the price by half. HP's Smart Cells are part of the company's StorageWorks Grid Architecture, launched last year. Smart Cells are small repositories of information. As data is captured on a smart cell, it's indexed and made available for retrieval to the application or the user, says Paul O'Brien, HP's director of ILM.

As part of HP's new release, it is now offering the StorageWorks Reference Information Manager, or RIM, which adds support for Lotus Domino/Notes (it already supported Microsoft Exchange). HP describes RIM as an archiving solution that utilizes a lower-cost storage pool that provides retention capabilities for compliance.

Unlike EMC and HP, IBM's enterprise content-management tools don't come out of its storage business unit but rather its software group, though company officials stress that its DB2 Content Manager and related tools all are designed to make optimized use of storage resources. The company's new Content Manager 8.3 adds automated records control of content via integration with IBM's DB2 Records Manager and also adds support for XML, which allows a common format for document retention.

Though Veritas has not updated Enterprise Vault since acquiring KVS last fall, the company has put a key emphasis on certifying selected enterprise channel partners in deploying and supporting content archiving and retrieval capabilities, says Julie Parrish, Veritas' vice president of Americas field and channel marketing.

Parrish says Veritas is being selective in the channel partners it certifies because the technology is complex. "It is important that we get it right with our partners before they go out and sell it," she says.

At least one key storage player, Hitachi Data Systems, questions whether these systems are truly scalable enough to handle all enterprise data at this point.

The average size of a Documentum, Filenet or Vignette-based content-management system is in the 6- to 20-TB range, argues Jack Domme, HDS vice president of storage-management software. "That represent less than 4 percent of the data in an enterprise," Domme says. That begs the question, he adds: "What are we going to do with the rest of this data that's held in databases or free file formats?" Domme is mum on how HDS will address this business, but says that will unfold in the near future.

Managing The Content
Storage vendors push myriad CM wares
EMC: Unified document repository, federated search, support for Outlook and policy-retention function
HP: Upgraded capacity of RISS Server, offers API to build ILM into applications
IBM: Content Manager 8.3 supports XML and .Net, automated records control via integration with DB2 Records Manager for auditing capability
Veritas: With acquisition of KVS, the company is readying upgrade and training enterprise partners selectively