EMC is bidding farewell to its EmailXtender archiving software in favor of SourceOne, a new platform designed with an eye toward today’s data centers.
Announced today, the SourceOne family of products reportedly has better controls over archiving policies, eDiscovery, retention and overall information lifecycle management (ILM).
One of the keys to SourceOne is scale. The software is built to operate in a single server for midsize companies and scales to meet the archiving needs of large enterprises. SourceOne’s modular architecture allows for the dynamic addition of new content sources or other back-end repositories.
The SourceOne family includes three products: SourceOne Email Management, SourceOne Discovery Manager and SourceOne Discovery Collector.
SourceOne Email Management archives e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino as well as SMTP and instant messages with international support and localized interfaces in seven languages.
SourceOne Discovery Manager offers high-volume discovery search and collection for e-mail archived by the SourceOne Email Management software. Discovery Manager locates, holds, culls and produces archived e-mail in response to legal/regulatory or corporate compliance policies.
SourceOne Discovery Collector is an indexing appliance that automates the in-house identification, collection, preservation, and policy management of unstructured content that resides on desktops, laptops, CIFS and NFS, NAS, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other content management repositories.
The initial release of SourceOne will support e-mail and instant message archiving with support for files, SharePoint, enterprise applications, XML and other content types to follow in the next 12 to 18 months, according to EMC director of product marketing, Sheila Childs.
Current EmailXtender customers will not have to rip-and-replace existing installations, according to Childs, because SourceOne can manage legacy EmailXtender archives “under the covers.” She says that SourceOne was designed from scratch without using any EmailXtender technology.
“SourceOne is a completely new product with brand new code and is a replacement for EmailXtender,” says Childs. “Many of the archiving products that exist today were conceived 10 years ago without an understanding of how critical e-mail would become over time. The sheer volume of e-mail is now in the terabyte range in some cases and eDiscovery is an issue. Archiving developers didn’t conceive of these requirements back then.”
The SourceOne software is tuned to manage archives, retention and storage tiering on EMC’s hardware platforms, including Centera and Celerra, but also works with heterogeneous hardware.
Childs says SourceOne is also open in terms of application integration through API support for partners interested in embedding functionality in the platform.
EMC claims SourceOne can save customers more than 50% in total cost and pay for itself in a year with potential savings of up to $1 million for companies with 1,000 e-mail mailboxes. The company also claims customers can reduce storage and backup costs by as much as 60%.
Childs says pricing for the SourceOne product will be “highly competitive” and is currently priced below competing products. She ballparks pricing for 1,000 mailboxes at $50,000 with an additional charge for eDiscovery based on the number of mailboxes searched.
SourceOne Email Management and SourceOne Discovery Collector are available now. SourceOne Discovery Manager will be generally available in the latter part of this quarter.
EMC is set to explain SourceOne and its archiving and information governance strategy in a webcast later today.
