More Evidence of Scale and Performance Wars

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-03-04 15:38:16  As if to prove that the scale and performance wars truly are heating up, I received a note from a vendor within hours of the publication of my last journal entry, “The Scale and Performance Wars Begin.”  Mind you, I’m not picking on the vendor here; these folks have product to sell and, to do that, they need to market their abilities.  And, most of them truly believe they have a scalable platform, so why wouldn’t they market it?This vendor points out that the chart in my journal entry is not quite complete.  This is true – the chart is not meant to be a true framework, but rather a comparison of vendor claims.  As this vendor points out, “you need to have vendors specify the number of servers they are using to reach these speeds.  A few of the vendors listed are using multiple appliances to reach the numbers they reference. This is not an apples vs. apples comparison.  If you need a dozen servers to reach certain speeds, is that an efficient solution vs. a platform that requires one?”These are great questions to point out.  Anyone evaluating eDiscovery software is going to have a hard time finding a way to compare tools in an apples-to-apples fashion.  And, even if we are to know how many servers these vendors are using to get the numbers they report, we know nothing about the make-up of the data corpus.  It’s very different to process a bunch of Word documents than it is to process TBs of PST files.For buyers, one good bet is to take a dataset that you have in your organization (hopefully made up of a very diverse set of content types) and invite vendors in for a POC in a controlled environment.  As much as possible, keep the vendors’ hands out of the test – these vendors say their products deploy in minutes and are easy to deploy and manage.  Let the proof be in the pudding.We at eDiscoveryJournal will continue to look for ways to serve as an independent body that can help to facilitate objective comparisons.  If you have any ideas, please let us know via the form below.