Storing The Army's FilesStoring The Army's Files

Officers in the U.S. Army want to keep every file, document, and E-mail they've ever handled, which can burden file and mail servers, clog networks, and make it hard to find and retrieve documents. "They never get rid of anything," says Lt. Col. William Hoppe, a commander in the Army's acquisition office.

He recently tested software from Persist Technologies Inc., called AppStor, that resides within a bank of storage blades and pulls information off file servers and other storage systems. The software sets up an automatic process to capture, index, search, retrieve, and distribute files; it's priced at $45,000 per terabyte of storage.

AppStor can process 40 documents per second and guarantees response time of three seconds for 500 concurrent users, Persist says. Hoppe plans to deploy an AppStor system this summer. "Ultimately, we want to drop any document we need into the appliance and access it by word search from the network or the Web."