EMC debuts data-management software

The Hopkinton data storage company EMC Corp. will roll out a set of new products today, aimed at filling out the company's "information lifecycle management" strategy.

"Information lifecycle management is moving from theory to practice to results," said Chuck Hollis, EMC's vice president of storage platforms marketing.

EMC and many other storage companies have embraced the concept of information lifecycle management, which lets businesses assign different levels of importance to different kinds of information, then allows them to easily shift that information to the most efficient kind of storage medium. Data that a company needs every day are stored on high-speed disk arrays close to the offices that need it, while older records that are rarely used can be shifted to slower, cheaper, and more remote storage facilities.

The new products are designed to make this process cheaper and easier. One of them uses technology from VMware, a company EMC acquired last year. The VMware software lets storage administrators manage the server computers at remote storage sites. Another new product lets companies with three remote data centers easily replicate all the data stored at each center, while allowing continuous replication of data between two of the sites if a third should go down.

EMC will also offer new software for its Celerra network server that can automatically analyze stored data and decide whether to move it to slower, cheaper storage devices, or faster, more costly ones.

Most of the new EMC products will go on sale in the first quarter of 2005, but the VMware product is available now.

HIAWATHA BRAY