Ante Up For Compliance

Nexsan Technologies, Woodland Hills, Calif., acquired AESign Evertrust, a Montreal-based startup developer of information life-cycle management (ILM) technology aimed at compliance needs.

Also last week, Hewlett-Packard expanded the ILM capabilities of its HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS), an application-aware, content-based archiving array.

The market should offer plenty of room for them and others, such as EMC and its Centera appliance. The compliance market is expected to grow 22 percent yearly through 2009, according to research firm IDC.

Nexsan's newly acquired AEStore software prevents unauthorized changes and enables audit trails of archived electronic records, regardless of platform or media. Diamond Lauffin, senior executive vice president at Nexsan, said AEStore will be integrated with Nexsan's ATAbeast, an ATA-based array. The new appliance will be released in 60 to 90 days, he said. "Now we can have a solution instead of cobbled-together hardware and software," said Michael Fanelli, Western regional manager at SSI hubcity, a Metuchen, N.J.-based solution provider. "If Nexsan can make an appliance that deals with compliance, it's nothing but great news."

HP's RISS appliance already offers integrated storage, search and retrieval for e-mail archiving. It uses what HP calls "Smart Cells," physical or logical storage devices connected on a storage grid, said Paul O'Brien, director of ILM for HP's StorageWorks Division. Last week, HP boosted Smart Cell capacity, bringing the base capacity of an RISS to 1.8 Tbytes, O'Brien said. RISS also now supports archiving of e-mails from Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. RISS had worked only for Exchange.

In addition, the Palo Alto, Calif., company unveiled HP StorageWorks File System Extender version 3.1, software that automates data movement across multiple storage tiers.

Between 30 percent and 40 percent of RISS sales go through the channel, said O'Brien.

Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation, a San Diego-based HP solution provider, said customers are excited about the RISS appliance, which can search millions of records in just a few seconds.

"Everybody [has arrays that] save one copy of a file," he said. "But the question is how to index and search those files. HP is best because of its integrated solution."