EMC Broadens ILM Offerings, Improves App Performance

EMC's moves in the ILM space are helping it act more like a software vendor and differentiate it from its competitors, said Pat Sherman, co-owner and vice president of sales at eServ, Peoria, Ill.

"EMC's challenge is to differentiate their ILM message from everybody else's," he said. "Now they've got all the pieces. Before their recent acquisitions, they were a hardware company and so had a half-baked solution."

Many of the new ILM solutions sprouted from EMC's acquisitions of Legato, VMware and Documentum. Chuck Hollis, EMC vice president of storage platforms, said EMC's new products approach ILM from three directions: tiered storage, or moving data to where it is best suited; application-aware ILM, for setting policies for data from specific applications; and application-independent ILM, for setting data policies across an enterprise.

The fastest-growing part--and the one that offers solution providers service opportunities with customers--is application-aware ILM, Hollis said. In this area, EMC is enhancing its EmailXtender e-mail management software and DatabaseXtender database management software to improve archiving and performance of these applications.

The new version of EmailXtender can be used with Microsoft Exchange 2003 in addition to Lotus Notes, Hollis said. Likewise, DatabaseXtender gains functionality for custom Oracle applications, PeopleSoft applications and custom Sybase applications in addition to standard Oracle applications. Both are slated for release next quarter.

To improve the data-migration performance from primary disk to secondary disk and to tape, EMC enhanced the Celerra FileMover software of its Celerra NS700G NAS Gateway to integrate with data-migration policy engines from EMC, Arkivio and Enigma.