The fight against data sprawl in the enterprise received a major boost this morning after Catalogic Software Inc. unveiled a landmark update for its copy management platform that promises to help administrators identify and eliminate redundant files much more efficiently. And in more parts of their environments, too.

At the center of ECX 2.2 is a new workflow engine that enables the creation of automated policies for controlling data propagation that can be customized to meet the specific operational needs of different workloads. The contents of a relational system containing sensitive information, for instance, can be continuously synchronized to a secondary backup location in order to ensure availability.

Such automation is invaluable in large organizations where a certain piece of data might be shared by dozens of different departments each with their own storage arrangements that are simply too numerous to effectively handle manually. As a result, copies are often simply left in place to take up space until they’re discovered.

And that usually happens during expensive audits that are made all the more difficult by the need to search for specific information by hand. ECX 2.2 promises to do away with that hassle and drastically cut the amount of overhead involved in day-to-day data management data in the process.

Instead of having to repeat the same operations over and over again, administrators can now simply implement the steps in a workflow that is automatically executed when certain conditions are met. That functionality is now not only available for the NetApp arrays that Catalogic has supported so far but also IBM Corp.’s rivaling Storwize and FlashSystem v9000 models along with systems running its SVC storage virtualization software.

Photo via theCUBE