The traditional approach to content management relies on the metadata from objects to rationalize, connect and organize the historical information of an organization. Some files (e.g., email archives) are rich in metadata, but most (e.g., Excel spreadsheets) are poor and require extensive and expensive classification to be successfully integrated into an overall corporate archive. This approach necessitates auto-classification by as yet unproven technologies.
An alternative approach is to use a consumer-based Google-like software infrastructure to ingest the data and search on just the content. Search technologies exist from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. Infrastructure technologies that will exploit large-scale commodity storage and servers have been developed by Google, Amazon and others. For example, the Google File System (GFS) assumes that failures will occur in hardware, software and locations and manages security and data integrity across a distributed network without requiring backups.
EMC rightly concludes that its traditional storage and storage software will be an order of magnitude too expensive to compete for this alternative approach. At the EMC analyst conference, Joe Tucci pre-announced Hulk & Maui, based on commodity storage and servers. The market for this type of system will be service providers (such as Mozy, just bought by EMC) as well as large organizations that want to put in their own storage service infrastructures.
Action Item: While EMC should be applauded for conceiving Hulk and Maui, users should not expect to see either the product or services based on this product to be mature any time soon. Any radically different approach will need significant time to test the integrity and reliability of the architecture and create operationally tested software.
Footnotes: In the fall of 2008, EMC formally announced ATMOS (code-named Maui), its cloud storage software architecture.
