Silicon Graphics, a world leader in high-performance computing, storage and visualization, today announced the latest enhancements to SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF). These enhancements further the company's leadership in delivering on the promise of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). Announced today are three new aspects to SGI's ILM offering. Collectively, with today's announcements SGI takes ILM one step further by seamlessly integrating information lifecycle management and data protection. The net result is an advanced ILM solution on the market helping customers realize as much as sixty to ninety percent storage cost savings, as well as higher productivity and higher data protection. -- First are new DMF features that augment SGI's well-established leadership in the performance and scalability aspects of ILM. -- Second, SGI is also adding features to simplify creating and implementing policy automation and is delivering an API, programmer's interface, which allows for complete ILM automation through the entire application layer. -- And third, SGI DMF software now has full support of EMC Legato Networker back up and recovery software. "We are pleased to work with SGI in providing industry leading data protection technology to its updated InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility," said Rob Emsley, director Product Marketing, EMC Software. "EMC Legato NetWorker -- an important feature of any information management lifecycle solution -- enables customers to centralize, automate and accelerate data protection across the enterprise. In addition, our Legato NetWorker application modules for disk-based backup and snapshot recovery further enhance our customer's ability to lower downtime costs and management overhead and strengthen ROI of storage resources." SGI DMF automates organizations data management policies allowing them to seamlessly adapt to changing data access patterns by transparently migrating files from online storage to near-line storage based on level of access needed. By automating the data migration process, DMF lowers the risk of operator error and data format changes, raises productivity by keeping data accessible in a "live" environment and creates a virtual capacity pool among multiple storage devices for lower total cost of ownership. This automated technique replaces the traditional process of maintaining a large amount of inactive data on expensive disk storage or manually archiving data to tape. "Customers are asking for a higher level of control over their data, which is precisely what SGI and EMC are offering today," said Gabriel Broner, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Software Group, SGI. "SGI's ILM vision incorporates the seamless integration with other storage solutions, starting with data protection. With new DMF features and integration with EMC Legato NetWorker, SGI and EMC are executing on the delivery of true ILM benefits for customers today." Enhancements to SGI DMF that build existing, unmatched performance and scalability include: -- Custom Defined Policies and File Tagging to enable administrators simply and easily define and deploy DLM policy automation with pre-defined options for the most common requirements and over four billion possible policy criteria for the ultimate in available customization. -- Accelerated Access to First Byte in combination with Automatic Load Balancing provides instant access to migrated data to give customers investment protection they need for years to come. -- Partial file Recall and Migration, a key feature for raising productivity, allows users to access data faster, avoid time and disk-consuming unintentional file recalls. For more than 10 years DMF users have been able to define and deploy DLM policy automation. With the new DMF enhancements data can be uniquely classified -- even at the file level -- and policies can be customized based upon the unique criteria of the environment, including file names, quality of service, priority, time of day, geographic location. Also for the first time data classification can be implemented from sources external to the DMF system, including the user and application. These capabilities are the gateway to entering the new world of DLM. EMC Legato NetWorker Version 7.1.2 fully supports DMF on SGI IRIX systems today and will begin shipping with complete support for DMF on SGI Altix systems running 64 bit Linux in November.