Start-ups reinforce storage intelligence

The acronyms were coined before many customers started plunking down their dollars.

Whether it's called Information Asset Management (IAM) or Information, Classification and Management (ICM) or Intelligent Data Management (IDM), some start-ups are banking on making sense of the burgeoning data on networks, classifying it, and storing it on the appropriate media based on policies set by an IT administrator. Among the early entrants are Scentric, Arkivio, Kazeon, Njini, StoredIQ and Abrevity.

The Taneja Group lumps the software and appliances from these start-ups into what it calls Information, Classification and Management.

"ICM is a class of application-independent software that utilizes advanced indexing, classification, policy and data access capabilities to automate data management activities," says Brad O'Neill, senior analyst for The Taneja Group. "IT managers want to get into the data infrastructure and begin to make business decisions on how information is grouped, accessed, moved, stored and disposed of."

StoredIQ was the first company to come out of stealth mode, in February 2003, with a product that resembled a storage resource management (SRM) package for network-attached storage devices. The company's appliance-based software gathered file-based data and analyzed it to improve use.

DeepFile, as the company was then known, realized that identifying, isolating and separating redundant data for improved utilization was not a successful business model. It reorganized a year later into a company that makes appliances that discover, monitor and manage file-based unstructured data for compliance and security reasons. StoredIQ counts Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona as one of its customers.

The company released its first software package, called the HIPAA Solutions Pack, in January. The software helps customers conform to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Installed on the StoredIQ appliance, the HIPAA Solutions Pack uses a lexicon to find files that match specific regulatory requirements, and then encrypts them and moves them to the appropriate archival storage.

The Austin, Texas, company plans other lexicons for regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Securities and Exchange Commission Rules 17a-3 and 4.

Other start-ups have also capitalized on this nascent market of classifying, analyzing and acting on file-based data. Arkivio, Kazeon, Njini and Abrevity use appliances based on industry-standard servers to discover, collect utilization and usage statistics, and classify data into logical groups for data retention purposes. Based on rules an IT administrator sets, data can then be migrated and moved to different tiers of storage for compliance purposes, and users can retrieve and restore those files.

Established companies such as EMC and Network Appliance have storage arrays and software that address file-oriented data. EMC's Centera and Network Appliance's NearStore work with data on both Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Unix/Linux Network File System (NFS). Software layered on these boxes, such as Network Appliance's Virtual File Manager, addresses a variety of capabilities, including the categorization and migration of storage.