Novell announced that its information lifecycle management technology, formerly known as Shadow Volumes, will be included in Open Enterprise Server 2.

Now known as Dynamic Storage Technology (DST), the ILM technology takes huge amounts of file data – Excel spreadsheets, Word files, PDFs – stored on Linux file servers and aggregates it under a shadow volume. Based on policies, DST can look at files that have not been accessed in more than 30 days, and move them to less expensive storage. Like other ILM or hierarchical storage management (HSM) software, the user does not need to know where the data has been moved to.

The primary and shadow volumes are logical mount points into the Linux file system and create a merged view of the data. DST is accessed through the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) and NetWare client. In the future, it will be able to be accessed by SAMBA and the Microsoft Common Internet File System. It is managed via Novell Resource Manager.

HSM software isn’t anything new to NetWare environments. CaminoSoft and Moonwalk Systems have HSM packages. So do Commvault and Knozall Systems. But there is nothing for Open Enterprise Server 2, Novell’s hybrid technology in which NetWare runs as a guest operating system on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Dynamic Storage Technology takes care of all that. You can listen to Novell engineers and product managers talk about Dynamic Storage Technology at Novell Open Audio.

Novell is presently open beta testing Open Enterprise Server 2 and expects the finished product will ship this summer.

Storage in the news:

* Micronet announced a new network-attached storage platform for small and midsized businesses that includes 4TB of storage capacity. The Platinum NAS 4.0 uses 1T-byte Serial ATA disk drivers. It features hot-swappable disk drives and supports RAID 0, 1 and 5, as well as RAID 1 mirroring. The Platinum NAS 4.0 is expected to be available in the second quarter starting at $879.

* Siafu Software announced that all of its IP SAN appliances now include block-based replication for encrypted data, making branch office replication and data protection reliable and easy to deploy. The Siafu Swarm IP Encrypted Replication SAN appliances start at $9,000.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.