SEC selects EMC for e-mail storage

The Securities and Exchange Commission will deploy a storage management solution from EMC Corp. to handle the thousands of mailboxes in its Microsoft Exchange environment, the company said today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The SEC's choice of the EMC solution is notable because the company developed it, in part, to help financial institutions comply with SEC mandates for preserving and indexing electronic records.

The SEC will deploy EMC's Centera line of content addressed storage systems and run Legato Software's EmailXtender and DiskXtender applications to automatically move e-mail messages off the agency's Exchange servers. Legato is a division on EMC.

Officials at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC said the SEC's Office of Information Technology was looking for a solution that would reduce the size of its message databases while improving its ability to search e-mail archives as the files are needed.

"The EMC/Legato solution will substantially improve the SEC's ability to manage and access its e-mail databases and, to that extent, enable the SEC to perform its mission more efficiently," said Howard Elias, EMC's executive vice president of corporate marketing and office of technology.

Legato EmailXtender and DiskXtender automatically shuttle e-mail messages to the Centera storage system, where each message is assigned a unique content address for easy retrieval. The Centera system is a magnetic disk-based, WORM (write once, read many) device designed to comply with regulatory requirements because the data cannot be overwritten.

With 2003 revenues of $6.24 billion, EMC ranked No. 87 on Washington Technology's 2003 Top 100 list, which measures federal contracting revenue. Washington Technology's 2004 rankings are due out in May.