Seven months after EMC Corp. acquired Documentum, the fruits of that union will be unveiled next week in a new content management system designed for information lifecycle management (ILM) that automates the movement of content according to business rules.

The new EMC Documentum Content Storage Services is being billed as the industry's first storage-aware content management platform. The software will support all EMC storage platforms, in addition to several non-EMC storage devices, according to Neville Letzerich, EMC director of product marketing.

Available immediately, Documentum Content Storage Services enables organizations to define and execute storage policies that automate the movement of content across a heterogeneous storage infrastructure. The software moves the content according to its value and related business policies that utilize standard and user-defined attributes, including content type, access control level, lifecycle state, sharing permissions, industry regulations or archiving requirements, as well as date last accessed, size, related transactions or related documents.

ILM is an approach to content and storage management that uses policies, processes, and technology to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure.

What separates the EMC/Documentum approach to ILM is the policy engine, according to Letzerich. The policy engine enables users to define and change the allocation and migration polices. Storage administrators and business users work to define policies that specify the initial storage device/tier and rules for migrating information across storage tiers. Policies can be executed automatically as a result of a system event, ad-hoc or in batch. Documentum Content Storage Services also includes migration logs and audit-trail capabilities so that content movement among storage tiers can be monitored for internal accounting and charge backs.

"People still struggle with manual, error-prone processes for content archival and retention," said Letzerich. "If IT has no way to allocate storage service levels based on the value of the content, it can result in unnecessary and potentially costly exposure to risk, unintended content deletion and noncompliance. Until now, IT organizations have not been able to automatically allocate storage and align service levels with the changing business value of content. Other ILM solutions don't have the awareness of the various storage devices on which their business policies can execute."