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STANDARDS FOR CAS ADVANCED BY INDUSTRY COMPETITORS, SNIA

Eighteen Content Addressable Storage (CAS) proponents will share a consensus vision for industry standards in the areas of data archiving and regulation compliance at the ILM Solutions 2004 Conference and Expo. The event, sponsored by the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Data Management Forum (DMF), will be held Oct. 3-5 in Long Beach, Calif.

"More and more organizations are turning to CAS to provide a crucial element of their Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies," said Phil Mills, chair of the Data Management Forum. "The SNIA's DMF is working with the CAS community to establish industry standards that will enable organizations to implement CAS solutions with components from multiple vendors. A presentation of a common CAS vision at ILM Solutions 2004 is the DMF's first public demonstration of this work."

ILM is a broad methodology for controlling enterprise data throughout its entire lifecycle, intelligently providing for appropriate levels of data availability for varying categories of information. CAS helps ensure that data is available in its original, unedited form for long-term storage. With CAS, organizations can implement corporate archiving policies, adhere to regulations related to data retention, and make content available within a corporation, enhancing both data benefit and access speeds.

"CAS is an extremely important new storage paradigm," said Mills. "By using an address based on the content itself, it eliminates dependence on the physical and geographical location imposed by file systems, LUNs and block-based storage."