Don’t Forget About The Role of Storage in eDiscovery

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-09-15 13:49:23  There is a lot of focus on software applications in eDiscovery – ECA, identification and collection, legal hold.  Not to diminish the importance of these applications, but often lost in the hype is the critical importance of the storage hardware and software that support these eDiscovery applications.The storage used in eDiscovery operations is important in the same way that the user interface is important to legal groups looking at ECA and review applications.  If the storage system can’t keep up with the demands imposed on it by a high-volume processing, both the speed and the quality of the final output will suffer.  Data throughput performance will be stressed, for example, in enterprise-scale operations like eDiscovery that utilize tens or hundreds of clients hosted on modern multi-threaded, multi-core CPUs. Converting a number of large (~300GB or greater) source files to a much larger number of smaller target files requires a storage platform with capacity for high IOPS, as well as the capacity to perform many multiple concurrent read/write operations.When application vendors tout scale and performance numbers, be sure to look at the full environment for whatever testing the vendors have done.  Part of that environment will be the storage used.  Realize that you might not get the same performance if you are using existing storage that you have in your data center.   You should also consider your scale needs.  For example, if you are an organization that does ECA on a case-by-case basis and your matters average 20 GBs, a highly scalable solution is going to be overkill for now.  However, if you are a large organization taking a proactive approach to eDiscovery and building connectors to multiple data sources, you will want a good level of scalability for your eDiscovery applications.  It will make sense for you to take a hard look at the storage underlying these applications to make sure that they can be high-performance.