The policies can be applied by storage volume -- choosing a volume associated with a particular application, for example -- or on the basis of individual files, by choosing all data created by a particular user.

Another technology on show was Cobra, or Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis, a tool to help companies find and analyze what's being said about them by end users and commentators in discussion forums, blogs and other sites on the Web.

It's offered today through IBM's services division but will become part of its Cognos analytics product line in the future, said Scott Spangler, a senior technical staff member with IBM's Service-Oriented Technology group.

Cobra uses a service such as Boardreader to search message boards and forums and collect posts that include references to keywords, such as a brand or product name, and store them in a data warehouse.

That data is analyzed using models built for each customer, which identify patterns in what's being said by looking at things like text clustering, sentiment analysis and how frequently certain terms are used. Those patterns are then analyzed in concert to identify posts that can be useful to a company.