Data Discovery Experts - DiscoveryReady - Accelerate Productivity with Compellent SAN
In today’s regulatory landscape, the challenges of storing and managing terabytes of data—from e-mail trails to merger documentation—are myriad. If an audit or litigation occurs, costs associated with teams of lawyers reviewing this data and potential fines for noncompliance can be overwhelming. That’s why a growing number of Fortune 100 companies, from banks to pharmaceutical companies, are turning to New York–based DiscoverReady LLC, a professional services firm that helps reduce the headaches—and costs—of managing electronic data discovery.
DiscoverReady uses a process-driven approach to bring order, efficiency, and cost control to the often chaotic world of electronic data discovery and document review. All items related to a case are inventoried, uploaded, and then processed so that attorneys can rapidly review and categorize them. By outsourcing the document review process, DiscoverReady allows the expert lawyers and auditors hired by their clients to spend billable time inspecting only the most relevant documents. Increasing amounts of data at DiscoverReady became difficult to manage as processing requirements expanded. Not only was storage allocation inefficient, but the entire system would slow to a crawl because too many sets of processing applications were running concurrently. To stay competitive, Rachi Messing, the VP of Technology Services, realized that DiscoverReady needed a high-performance, scalable storage platform with sophisticated data lifecycle management software to effectively manage and secure sensitive data.
“Not only did the Compellent® Storage Center™ storage area network meet all of our reliability requirements, but the easy-to-use software tools offered a fast and effective information lifecycle management system,” Messing says. “Scalability was crucial, too— a typical litigation case can start with about 2 GB of data and end up with 1 TB or more. None of the other vendors we evaluated offered this amount of power and simplicity.”
Performance Skyrockets for Data-Intensive Processes
The performance and flexibility of the Compellent storage area network (SAN) easily supports multiple clients with multiple production timelines at DiscoverReady. Messing and his team initially implemented an 8 TB SAN running off iSCSI, seamlessly upgrading later to 24 TB.
“Our performance gains are around 300 percent in terms of the time it takes to sort and process data for review—an I/O-intensive process,” Messing says. “Since multiple processes now run without performance slowdown, data is ready for attorneys to review up to three times faster than before. This has led not only to increased satisfaction
but to more referrals from clients.”
Compellent’s Data Instant Replay creates space-efficient snapshots that provide quick recovery from data hazards during processing. Restoring data now takes minutes instead of days. DiscoverReady uses these Replays frequently during the processing, especially when reviewing email .pst files from clients that have a tendency to corrupt easily and contain many viruses. These Replays also allow the DiscoverReady team to conduct business-enhancement tests on document review and processing applications associated with litigation support, and to utilize live data without negatively affecting the integrity of the original data or the production environment.
Cutting Storage Costs By 50 PercentThe ability to optimize storage resources has also improved information lifecycle management at DiscoverReady. Compellent’s Data Progression™ software automatically tiers data in accordance with the user-defined policy as it moves from the initial processing stage of each case through the review period and beyond. This frees up valuable highperformance storage resources and eliminates time-consuming and risky manual transferring of data between tiers.
At the same time, DiscoverReady uses Compellent’s Enterprise Manager software to identify trends and usage patterns and compile system reports. As case data grows, Compellent’s Thin Provisioning software, called Dynamic Capacity™, enables DiscoverReady to provision storage from a single virtualized pool, without using physical capacity until data is written by the application. “We can now see how storage is being used and stay ahead of requirements. Enterprise Manager and Dynamic Capacity have helped us eliminate the costs that came with last-minute upgrades to our previous environment,” says Messing. “It’s a difficult number to quantify, but we estimated a savings of 50 percent in hardware costs alone after adopting Compellent.”
A Pain-Free Path to Future Growth
Increasing regulations mean that electronic data discovery is on the rise—and this places future growth at the forefront of Messing’s mind. “Our rate of growth meant we would have needed at least one more full-time IT resource focused just on storage if we had continued down our previous path. With Storage Center, we were able to realize the performance of a SAN environment without adding headcount.” The easy-touse enterprise storage capabilities offered by Compellent’s integrated software mean that the system administrator spends less than 30 minutes per month managing storage. It all adds up to growing value for DiscoverReady. “When you take improvements in performance, reliability and manageability into account, it’s impossible to quantify the exceptional value we’ve gained at DiscoverReady,” explains Messing.
The value continues to grow as time elapses. DiscoverReady recently introduced a complete disaster recovery system utilizing Compellent’s Remote Instant Replay. The initial setup took less than a day and it has not added to the company’s storage management time at all. The ability to provide a complete backup as well as a “hot” site means that DiscoverReady clients do not have to worry about down time even if disaster strikes at their datacenter. Administrators at DiscoverReady have also started using SAN volumes on their SQL servers, and as boot volumes on other servers, to further improve the processing performance and flexibility.
“The Compellent SAN has enabled us to make storage a non-issue,” Messing says. “We know it’s there, we can increase it seamlessly as needed, but we don’t have to worry about it. Compellent has saved us from some incredible headaches.”