by Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2009
As more mid-sized organizations look to DiscoverReady for assistance with the collection of electronically stored data, Rachi Messing and his team found a way to deliver a profitable service at a reasonable price by using effective storage management to control costs.
1:20: Rachi Messing opens his discussion by proclaiming, “I’m a geek…but this session is not going to be highly technical. We are going to look at cost of ownership and how high-performing storage affects e-discovery.”
1:21: Rachi describes the work that DiscoverReady does, the types of clients it serves and how e-discovery works.
1:23: Rachi asks, “How many people are here from the pure IT side,” and all audience members raise their hands.
1:25: First audience response question: Have you needed to assist your legal department with e-discovery? 82 percent of the audience has.
1:26: Rachi describes the e-discovery reference model, which attempts to put a standard process in place for e-discovery.
1:29: Second audience response question: How many requests have you assisted collecting data for? 36 percent said between two and five and 27 percent said more than 11 times in their lifetimes.
1:30: Rachi outlines his IT infrastructure before Compellent:
- Startup mode:
o Microsoft SQL Server
o Processing workstations
o Microsoft Windows XP and 2003
o NAS and DAS solutions which multiplied rapidly
o Remote viewers worldwide – 24x7x365
1:32: Pain points Rachi experienced:
- Expanding processing requirements slowed production
- Increasing amounts of data difficult to manage
- Inefficient storage allocation
- Backups and redundancy
1:35: “We started out on tape backup and as our storage grew, backups became a nightmare. It would take 24 hours to complete a backup, and by the time it was done, all the data had changed.”
1:37: Rachi’s purchase process started with magazine reviews and initially consisted of 12 vendors. Rachi quickly narrowed the number of vendors down to 6. Rachi evaluated each solution on performance, feature set, cost and scalability.
1:38: “We quickly narrowed down our choice to Compellent.”
1:40: “What if iSCSI is not good enough. Well at the time, Compellent ws the only option that offered iSCSI and FC flexibility…if we see that iSCSI isn’t the way to go, we can bring in some people to switch over to Fibre Channel.”
1:41: “The fast, effective ILM was the real selling point for us. We do a lot of data analysis as the data comes in, but after that’s done, you might have no way of effectively segregating out the data because you don’t have the time. All of that data is going have to sit and live on that system, until that point in time that the case is over, which can be weeks, months, or years. The attorneys need quick access to it, but only look at a document three months or a year down the road.”
1:43: “ILM is the perfect application for older data. There’s no reason to keep old data on 15K, expensive Fibre Channel drives. Instead, move it down to SATA drives.
1:44: The IT infrastructure after Compellent:
- Compellent SANs in New York and New Jersey
- Began with 8TB SAN running off iSCSI; now have 100 TB SAN and growing
- Back-end file storage
- Microsoft SQL servers
- Nine servers and three VMware servers
- Hundreds of remote reviewers
- Implementation of DR strategy with offsite replication
1:49: An audience member recalls having to order three tapes from offsite storage at a cost of $8,000 for three tapes.
1:51: DiscoveryReady’s results:
- 300 percent performance gain in data prep process
- Estimated hardware savings of over 50 percent over previous storage methodology
- Speedy data restores in minutes instead of days
- Reduction in storage management time
- Rapid scalability and seamless upgrades to meet growing data needs
- Less than 10 percent of data on tier 1 storage
1:56: Another audience response question: What is the average cost to review 2 GB of email data (average collection per employee)? The correct answers: both $20,000 and $60,000.
1:58: “One of the most important things you can do is manage your storage well…Serious storage management equals serious savings.”