EMC Corp. today announced Centera Seek, designed to search, retrieve, and utilize active enterprise archives created with EMC Centera CAS (content addressed storage) system.

The software is based on the InStream enterprise search technology from Fast Search and Transfer (Fast) that is designed to speed the discovery and retrieval of data on the company"s archival content platform.

EMC also announced Centera Chargeback Reporter. Centera Chargeback Reporter is used in conjunction with Seek to create custom reports on capacity utilization and chargeback reports for corporate billing systems.

The new Centera Seek and Centera Chargeback Reporter software enables the advanced search and retrieval of fixed content across multiple terabytes, making utilization-based reporting and billing possible.

EMC Centera Seek provides advanced search capabilities using metadata, which is basically data about stored data. That enables faster, more precise searching and retrieval of information stored on Centera, according to EMC officials. The result will be higher-performance custom searches allowing customers to quickly search and retrieve the exact content they seek across the entire archive, even as those archives continue to expand and more users access the data, EMC officials said.

"EMC remains committed to lowering customer costs by helping those customers get more value from their growing digital assets. With EMC Centera Seek and EMC Centera Chargeback Reporter, EMC delivers on this commitment, and it gives them even more compelling reasons to make EMC Centera their central enterprise archive for more of their business applications," said Tom Heiser, senior vice president and general manager of EMC"s Centera Division.

Centera Seek and Centera Chargeback Reporter are available now with pricing for the systems varying according to capacity of a Centera installation. Centera installations can scale to 32 nodes. Seek is priced at US$4,000 for four nodes of capacity, while Chargeback adds $1,000 to that price.