Features - Storage Innovations:

EMC ANNOUNCES IMPROVED CENTERA PERFORMANCE, FUNCTIONALITY

EMC Corp announced new compliance functionality for its industry-leading EMC Centera CAS (content addressed storage) solution. EMC Centera is recognized as the industry's best solution to address the explosion of electronic fixed content and the regulatory issues that customers in markets such as financial services, health care and government face today. From Q203 through 1Q04, EMC has shipped 7PB of Centera Compliance Edition capacity. That amount is just a small fraction of the total Centera capacity shipped, yet it far surpasses capacities shipped by any other vendor of compliance products. This achievement clearly reflects EMC's market-leading momentum in the compliance market.

The new version of Centera's operating software, CentraStar V2.3, extends EMC Centera's market and technology leadership. It delivers new levels of performance and enhanced manageability, helping customers to maximize the business value of their ever-growing online fixed content archives. This new release enables organizations with compliance requirements to simplify information retention and disposition management, as well as address strict European Union and emerging U.S. privacy laws concerning personal data.

Randy Kerns, senior partner of Evaluator Group, said, "EMC is leading in the creation of a new market. Compliance has emerged as a key customer initiative, and EMC Centera's momentum in this space is clear."

Marc S. Sokol, CISM, CHS-III, chief security officer for The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, said, "At Guardian, we look at compliance from a holistic, corporate-wide perspective. Our focus is on improving quality, value, and efficiency in our business processes. We are always looking for opportunities to address a larger business need, rather than simply responding to individual regulatory obligations. EMC's Centera Compliance Edition delivers the storage infrastructure to address both regulatory challenges and improve efficiency, while addressing our retention needs in the areas of image file storage, vital records protection, record retention and e-mail archiving."

Tom Heiser, senior vice president and general manager of EMC's Centera Division, said, "EMC architected Centera Compliance Edition from the ground up specifically to address the business challenges tied to active fixed content archives, and to help customers adhere to strict government regulations and internal policies for corporate governance. These unique new compliance-related capabilities are the ones customers have been asking us for. They allow organizations to more easily manage and control the growing number of terabytes that are governed by regulations or individual retention policies."

The new Centera features include:

• Retention Classes -- To continually simplify an application's content management, this release provides additional capability to enforce and change retention policies for an entire class of content instead of managing each piece of content individually. This enhancement makes it easier to deal with both planned and unforeseen corporate policy or regulatory changes. With this new capability, Centera becomes the first and only storage solution to automate this critical retention management function.
• Audited Delete -- In many countries, protecting an individual's privacy is viewed as an ever-growing regulatory concern. Audited deletes permit an application to easily address this regulatory requirement through a tightly controlled process. Again, Centera is the first and only storage solution to automate the key processes around this requirement while meeting the most stringent compliance requirements related to retention and protection of data.
• Configurable Default Retention Period -- This feature allows the storage administrator to specify a default retention period in the event an application does not or cannot assign one.

This new version is backward-compatible with all installed Centera models, delivering investment protection to existing Centera customers.

Improved Performance And Manageability

With this release, Centera delivers up to a 2x improvement in write performance, and a more than 2x increase in read performance. A key differentiator of Centera is self-configuring, self-managing and self-healing capabilities. Centera now self-heals 2-6 times faster. In addition, more than 15 sensors have been added, allowing a storage administrator to monitor and view more activities within Centera.

Kerns said, "Our clients are continually asking questions about compliance and how to build an infrastructure that will scale as their compliance initiatives develop. High functionality, ease of use and simplified manageability are characteristics that are at the top of their buying-criteria list. Functionality like retention classes and audited delete for our customers outside the U.S. are ones that they continually mention as a need-to-have."

About EMC

EMC Corp is a provider of information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing automated networked storage solutions to help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.