The release of a new version of a storage solution offered by EMC Corp., Hopkinton, Mass., meets Defense Department requirements for records management, said David Cahill, senior manager of compliance technology for EMC.

Version 2.0 of EMC's Centera, a storage system built specifically for records management, complies with Department of Defense Directive 5015.2, Cahill said. This product was announced April 8.

The directive sets the guidelines for creating and preserving information as records within Defense Department offices. EMC developed Centera to the standards set by the directive not only to pursue Defense Department sales, but because the directive is becoming a benchmark for commercial companies.

Cahill said the government market is one of four select verticals in the company’s focus. Although the company does not break out sales of Centera for specific vertical markets, Cahill said it has sold about four petabytes worth of Centera storage. A petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes.

The first version, released April 2002, was designed for storing fixed content, or content that is not updated once stored. Each new piece of content is assigned a unique identification number, insuring that the content cannot be modified.

The system also can be configured to administer the retention policies of an agency, Cahill said. If an agency has a rule to erase electronic documents after a set period of time, the system can do that automatically and free the memory for future use. The system also has a shredding feature that erases data so that it cannot be recovered using disk-scanning tools.

The list price for the EMC Centera Compliance Edition begins at about $148,000 for a 4-terabyte solution.