NetApp Adds ECM and Archive Applications

NetApp, Inc. announced new enterprise content management (ECM) and archive solutions that enable customers to reduce storage requirements, simplify management, and provide recovery for ECM. For service providers that want to deliver advanced data services, NetApp is announcing archive-as-a-service.

                              Enterprise content management
                   or Microsoft SharePoint with NetApp storage

"We estimate organizations will archive over 500,000PB of data in the next five years," said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "Today’s announcements reflect NetApp’s commitment to help customers efficiently store and protect this information, which supports critical business processes such as records management and legal discovery. We are extremely excited about the ECM ‘hot backup’ capabilities as more and more organizations require this capability to manage and retain their critical information assets."

Innovations in the NetApp integrated data protection portfolio allow application-consistent backups for ECM and archive solutions, such as IBM FileNet, without downtime or business interruption, even when the application runs across multiple servers and storage systems. This ‘hot backup’ capability allows backups to be created more frequently without affecting ongoing business operations, improving availability and reducing risk.

"Hot backup is a must-have feature for many of our enterprise customers," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, IBM ECM Software Products and Strategy. "This capability enables our customers to easily protect their business-critical ECM data, while at the same time providing greater storage efficiency and shorter development cycles for their business process management applications. By leveraging solutions such as NetApp, IBM gives customers an enterprise-class business advantage by removing key obstacles around 24×7 availability while simultaneously managing cost and complexity."

Additionally, NetApp unified storage can simplify the complexity of storage typically associated with ECM and archive solutions and enables customers to house the database, index, and content storage on a single architecture. Built-in storage efficiency technologies such as deduplication help customers improve the total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of hardware, software, power, cooling, and floor space required. NetApp unified storage can also decrease the time to deployment and simplifies overall management.

"NetApp has established a strong track record of delivering innovative solutions to help our customers achieve greater storage efficiencies in archive and ECM storage environments," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. "Global enterprises rely on NetApp storage solutions to manage business-critical applications, such as IBM FileNet, Symantec Enterprise Vault, and Microsoft SharePoint to reduce risk, improve compliance, and respond to business requirements quickly."

For customers interested in moving archive and ECM data to NetApp storage, NetApp also offers new archive assessment and migration services. The assessment service allows customers to obtain a better understanding of their current and future archive storage requirements, obtains a detailed health check of their existing solution, and quantifies the ROI for moving to a NetApp unified storage infrastructure. The migration service helps customers migrate data nondisruptively from existing Centera storage onto NetApp storage. With the migration service, customers maintain any retention policies, using a fully auditable chain of custody.

In addition, NetApp is also introducing a new NetApp archive-as-a-service solution that enables service providers to deliver greater value to their customers by offering a broad range of archive storage services. Based on NetApp StorageGRID technology, the NetApp archive-as-a-service solution offers market-leading capabilities in block, file, and object storage technologies along with best practices and services. With NetApp archive-as-a-service, providers can develop tailored archive service offerings for specific industry verticals or by various policies or regulations governing the retention, security, immutability, and accessibility of archived data.

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