Data Domain, so seriously immersed in data deduplication technology that it changed its Nasdaq stock ticker symbol to "DDUP," said June 24 that it is now including a new "retention-lock" feature in its storage operating system for IT governance purposes.

IT governance is a subset of so-called corporate governance that focuses on risk management in IT systems. The increasing interest in IT governance is due mostly to compliance initiatives, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and Basel II in Europe. In addition, IT projects—especially those involving security and virtualization—can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

Data Domain claims that its Retention Lock is the industry's first software to allow file locking for regulatory governance with high-throughput deduplication. In other words, it's industrial-strength security and deduplication for enterprise nearline storage.

Nearline storage is data that is not housed on primary production disks or in archives. SATA (Serial ATA) drives are commonly used for this purpose.

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