As Symantec this week gears up to roll out a raft of new product upgrades this week, the one that has the most far reaching implications is the new release of Enterprise Vault.

Version 8.0 of Enterprise Vault gives Symantec customers a relatively inexpensive approach to disaster recovery because the upgrade adds the ability store files across multiple data centers. That means that one data center can essentially copy every file and store it at a companion data center in case of emergency. The ability to do this is a byproduct of extended support for clusters of distributed servers and enhanced compression algorithms that de-duplicate all the files being stored in Enterprise Vault. Essentially, customers get a free de-duplication utility built into the software.

With advent of virtualization and the ability of backup software to support distributed systems, the cost of implementing a disaster recovery plan is dropping dramatically. There is still work to be done in terms of creating automatically redundant infrastructures where business continuity is essentially built into the overall architecture. But as the cost of basic disaster recovery tools continues to drop, there is no real excuse for not having a disaster recovery plan in place today.

As for Symantec, the release of version 8.0 of Enterprise Vault is being coupled with the launch of version 9.0 of its Data Loss Prevention software and version 8.0 of its Brightmail gateway. The new version of Brightmail adds support for blocking files based on the reputation of the source of the files, while the new version of DLP adds new agent technology that tightly links the DLP software to Symantec's Altiris systems management software.

What's interesting about all this is the effort that Symantec is going to link what amounts to be a storage announcement in the form of Enterprise Vault with two updates to security products. Symantec is linking these products under the aegis of an Information Management Risk architecture that sounds noble. But it is still unclear a few years after the mega-merger between Symantec and Veritas whether storage and security products are being managed by the same people within the enterprise.

Some day these technologies will converge in terms of who manages and buys them. But for the moment, the effort to link storage and security products under a common architecture continues to feel a bit forced, at least until the point where an actual security event can trigger some sort of automated disaster recovery response on the part of the storage architecture.