Gateway allows legacy EMC customers to use Centera

By Kevin Komiega, SearchStorage.com News Writer 17 Jun 2003 | SearchStorage.com

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Storigen Systems Inc., Lowell, Mass., announced that Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. has licensed and is selling Storigen's patent-pending Centera Application Gateway (CAG). The gateway will provide organizations with the capability to integrate their existing legacy fixed-content management applications with EMC Centera content-addressed storage (CAS).

Centera is a software-driven storage architecture specifically designed to address the information storage requirements of fixed content.

EMC spokesman A.J. Ragosta said that the CAG is aimed at customers who run legacy fixed-content management applications.

"The way Centera works is that it is natively integrated with most applications, but older versions of those applications would not be integrated," Ragosta said.

He said that customers can implement the gateway because it speaks CIFS and NFS on one side and Centera's language on the other, which allows users to manage both new and legacy fixed-content applications under one umbrella.

However, the CAG is not entirely a substitute for a natively integrated application. Ragosta said that some content authentication is lost. "With the gateway, you're subject to all of the traditional complexity of managing [legacy storage]," he said. EMC said it began selling the CAG from Storigen and similar products from other companies because the demand for Centera has been great, so much so that EMC needed to accommodate legacy users.

Ragosta said that approximately 5% to 7% of all Centera customers use some form of application gateway.

While he cannot speak directly to the percentage of users who need an application gateway, Peter Gerr, senior analyst for Enterprise Storage Group Inc., in Milford, Mass., said that a gateway is a positive addition to the Centera portfolio. "It expands Centera's reach to allow other legacy applications to make standard NFS and CIFS [calls] to the Centera, rather than requiring API-level integration," Gerr said.

He said it provides a temporary solution for IT organizations that want to leverage Centera as a repository for fixed content and reference information assets, but whether they select an application that has already integrated with Centera's API or perhaps lobby their current ISV to complete the integration, the decision still lies with the end user.

"This is definitely a big victory for Storigen and provides them with a broad channel into a variety of high-growth vertical industries that are leveraging Centera for fixed-content data, as well as issues related to regulatory compliance," Gerr said.

EMC has tweaked the Centera and signed on several partners in recent months.

In May, database-archiving specialist Princeton Softech said that the latest version of its archiving software, Archive for Servers 5.2, meets auditing, reporting, business and legislative compliance requirements for relational database content that is archived and managed by Centera Compliance Edition.

The compliance capabilities in Archive for Servers include support for Centera Compliance Edition's retention enforcement features, which enable users to set hardened retention periods on electronic records. The retention periods are specified in Archive for Servers, and EMC Centera enforces the data retention period in the storage environment.

EMC had debuted the Centera Compliance Edition three weeks prior to the Princeton Softech news. According to the company, this family of Centera products was designed to solve the challenges associated with managing and storing fixed content, or unchanging data, like document images, e-mail, X-rays and medical records.

The CAG is currently available from EMC.

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