data compliance and archiving

e-discovery software vendors continue to broaden scope

Recommind and Clearwell Systems expanded their e-discovery and regulatory compliance records management product lines this week with support for more areas of the e-discovery Reference Model (EDRM).

Recommind, which already has Axcelerate eDiscovery and Insite Legal Hold products out on the market for preservation, collection, processing, culling, review and production of data, added support for information management, collection, and classification with the new MindServer Categorization software module.

The new search, indexing and classification module is based on the same underlying search and index engine as the rest of the Recommind product line. Recommind uses an algorithm devised at MIT that can be “taught” to derive meaning and relevance from content, and perform “concept searches” that don’t rely on keyword matches.

Recommind VP of marketing Craig Carpenter says there’s little difference in the underlying technology, but each of Recommind’s modules are used for different purposes. While Axcelerate eDiscovery is generally used by law firms, and Legal Hold by internal counsel, MindServer is mostly targeted to a corporate records management or enterprise end users for “search and index for knowledge management” rather than strictly litigation support. The product began shipping this week. Pricing is offered according to a per-seat licensing model or a per-server license. Pricing varies according to size of deployment, but Carpenter said enterprise deals are typically $50,000 to $100,000.

 Clearwell Systems added new modules to its e-discovery framework for pre-processing, review and production. “Clearwell had been in early stage processing, but now they can perform full review, including redaction and auto-redaction in preparation for formal production,” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group ESG).

 Babineau says the product launches represent “a natural progression for both companies,” as e-discovery software makers across the board look to broaden their reach across the full EDRM spectrum. Babineau said the number of small companies looking to create “one-stop-shops” for compliance and litigation support is an indicator of how strong the market is right now.

“Not every vendor can survivve being all things to all people,” he said. “At least right now, there’s enough money in the market with things like the [Bernie] Madoff investigation and new regulations [following last year's financial crisis] to keep all of these players alive and fund their R&D efforts.”

RenewData acquires legal review software maker

RenewData announced today it’s bought the privately-held Digital Mandate for an undisclosed sum, and plans to add Digital Mandate’s Vestigate legal review software to its eDiscovery software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

RenewData CEO Steven Horan says law firms and large corporations use Digital Mandate software to do “first-pass review” of electronically stored information (ESI) to determine its relevance to litigation. The application culls data sets before they are submitted for more granular legal review. “If I’m a customer, I don’t want to invest a million dollars just to know if I have a problem,” he said. Horan mainatins Vestigate can provide about 85% validity of the final data set, with the goal of cutting down legal fees that would be incurred by submitting the full data set for granular review.

RenewData provides services for planning, preservation and collection, processing, review, and production of electronic evidence, risk management, and data archiving. Horan said Vestigate was also offered as a service, but ReviewData will use it to offer something that can be put “behind the firewall” in customer environments where compliance or security concerns make a service less appealing.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Brian Babineau said RenewData, which had been partnering with Attenex (now owned by FTI), had to make this move in response to wider industry consolidation in eDiscovery. “This is a simple e-discovery market roll up,” he said. “[RenewData] had a legal service provider business by using Attenex software. However, when FTI bought Attenex, FTI also has a legal service provider business, [and] Renew was then using a direct competitor’s software.”

Babineau called the merger with Digital Mandate a “good hedge, but it doesn’t propel them forward” in the market.

Socha Consulting founder George Socha, said he’d had a “limited degree of exposure” to Digital Mandate’s product, but RenewData’s approach of bringing more parts of the e-discovery process in house is “consistent with what I hear consumers and law firms say they want - one throat to throttle. RenewData has expanded further across the eDiscovery spectrum.”

Nayatek adds file archiving

Emerging data archiving software player Nayatek released a new version of its Datosphere software this week, adding support for archiving Windows file systems to its existing support for email, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), instant messaging and unified communications. The company’s goal is to build what it calls a “data neutral” archive through a modular design that features connectors for each type of data supported.

Nayatek’s file archiving offers federated search, some e-discovery/custodian role features, although VP of product management Scott Lehmann said the company is still working on legal hold and SharePoint. Datosphere can stub or copy a file to the archive while deleting it completely from primary storage. File archiving policies are available according to age, size or document type. End users can access and view archived files and emails through an Outlook folder or web client, and perform federated searches across all data types from one interface.

Datosphere comes with a Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) architecture, in a standard HA (dual) version and an enterprise n-way version. The software itself ships within a virtual appliance. According to Lehmann, Datosphere remains Windows-focused for email and files so far, though Unix support is planned. Similarly, single instancing in the Datosphere archive is currently limited to email and within file shares – no global data reduction yet.

While Nayatek has managed in a short time (the company came out of stealth in December) to match many of the major features of more established competitors, it will be difficult to break into this market without significant differentiation. According to Lehmann, Datosphere’s software-only model and the simplicity of its modular design will make it more user-friendly than competitors’ offerings.

But Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Brian Babineau said it will probably take more than that for Nayatek to overtake competitors like Symantec, EMC, Autonomy-Zantaz and Mimosa Systems in the data compliance and archiving market. The biggest differentiator in this market is breadth of support for multiple operating systems and applications, especially Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes email as an alternative to Exchange. E-Discovery, search and compliance capabilities, and a SaaS option or cloud partners are also keys to success, Babineau said.

“No one has it all,” Babineau said. “As a shiny new object in the marketplace, Nayatek may get some attention — but where they’re going to go long-term is the biggest question mark I have looking at them right now.”

Group Logic looks to ease Mac integration headaches for file archives

The maker of software that connects Mac workstations with Windows servers is launching a new product  that it claims will prevent “bad Mac behavior” with data archive stub files.

Group Logic’s main product is ExtremeZ-IP, software used to connect Mac clients with Windows servers. According to CEO Reid Lewis, a problem can arise when Mac clients are attached to Windows file servers where a file archiving program is leaving stubs.

Apple’s Mac OS X operating system includes features for end users called Quick Look, which shows users a preview of documents in the OS X file system. According to Lewis, the call that Quick Look makes to the primary file share can make archiving software think the files are being called back from the stub location. “When the Mac tries to render a prieview, the archive sees that as a read and bumps the file back up to primary storage.” It’s easy to imagine a scenario from there where a quick flip through all the contents of a folder could clog up the primary file server, Lewis added.

Group Logic’s new ArchiveConnect software, when installed on the Mac client, can provide a translation that allows for Quick Look while preventing stub files in the archive from being restored during a preview operation. Group Logic is charging $1.60 per GB of archive data addressed by Mac clients, and contemplating a per-client licensing scheme as well.

It’s a niche issue, said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), and it would be easier for users if this kind of integration came directly from an archiving vendor rather than a third party.

However, he added, non-Windows applications remain an area that has largely been ignored in the enterprise archiving world to date. “We rare all aware of the benefits file archiving can bring–however, Mac environments that need archiving need more than just HSM because the type of data that they store is usually different than your traditional Windows or Linux environment,” Babineau said. “Solutions that can support the applications which generate more content types and archive the data right from the application are more compelling from my standpoint.”

Proofpoint buffs up email archiving SaaS

Email archiving SaaS vendor Proofpoint is adding compliance features to its services today in an effort to reach more enterprise users. The company that bought email archiving SaaS provider Fortiva last year is building new enterprise search and e-Discovery features into its service based on a newly-patented method for searching encrypted data.

Proofpoint email archiving appliances reside at the customer’s location, serving as a “gateway” into the cloud. The Microsoft Exchange email server journals emails to a special mailbox, which the gateway then draws from to send data to the cloud. The service integrates with the customer’s on-premise Active Directory to provide authentication and role-based access to the archive, and provides Web-based search of the archive for administrators as well as end users.

What makes Proofpoint’s approach unique, according to vice president of archiving product management Rick Dales, is that it provides search and other services without any visibility into customers’ data. When the data is ingested through the appliance, an encrypted index token is sent to Proofpoint’s data centers alongside the data. When users want to perform a search, the Proofpoint middleware makes a correlation between the index token and encrypted data, allowing it to return search results without ever decrypting the information. This is the process that was awarded a patent this week; new with this release is the ability for end users to perform these searches on their portion of the archive, rather than just IT admins.

Some of today’s updates to the service also build on these capabilities, like new support for the archiving and search of historical email, meaning email which belongs to users who have left the organization. In prior releases, if users were no longer visible in Active Directory, they would no longer be accessible through Proofpoint. With this release, Active Directory names and encrypted mailbox IDs are sent from the user’s appliance along with the encrypted index tokens. Proofpoint has no visibility into a correlation between the Active Directory names and the globally unique identifier (GUID), but can do a lookup on the plain-text name if requested by the user, including generating an address book showing all email addresses registered to that name.

“Often, lawsuits relate to people who are no longer with the organization,” said Dales.

Users can queue mail for supervisory review in environments where compliance dictates that, and the new version allows them to ‘whitelist’ emails that shouldn’t be sent to the queue, like newsletters. Similarly, updates to the Proofpoint policy engine mean users can apply policies to ‘all mail with exceptions’. Users will also now have the option of retaining data indefinitely, rather than having to decide on a retention period up front. The software also now supports archiving instant messages in addition to email. Finally, a new active legal hold feature flags new mail for archive that may be relevant to existing cases.

The announcement may be among signs that email archiving SaaS offerings, which one analyst described as “not ready for prime time” in the enterprise last year, are beginning to catch up with on-premise products, according to ESG’s Babineau. “They might not be able to catch up fully, because there are some inherent limitations to the cloud environment,” he said. “But the operational benefits that they deliver, i.e., they don’t require any IT ops management and you don’t have to buy any storage, make them a viable alternative to on-premise solutions, especially in this economy.”

Google beefs up Search Appliance - will e-Discovery search follow?

Google Inc.’s Search Appliance (GSA) got a facelift today with the release of version 6.0. The focus of the release was adding scalability. Google claims that racks full of the modular appliances can now centrally search up to a billion files (between four and five racks, to be exact). In support of this scale, Google is also launching new hardware for GSA called the GB-9009, based on the new R710 server from Dell and Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel.

GSA can also be further customized in 6.0 than previous releases for enterprises. An auto-complete feature in the search box (similar to the auto-complete on Google.com) will offer suggestions to users as they’re typing search terms based on the enterprise’s internal “crowdsourcing.” Users can flag content for others to find, which Google calls “social search.” Node biasing - which weights search results according to what storage device they come from - and collection biasing - similar to node biasing, but with collections of documents - are also available for users to customize search results with 6.0.

GSA can pull search results from archiving and e-Discovery repositories including EMC Corp.’s Documentum and IBM’s FileNet, but doesn’t contain compliance workflow features e-Discovery and archiving applications usually offer. GSA product manager Cyrus Mistri said GSA can be used to search across multiple e-Discovery and archiving repositories, but the search algorithm itself is optimized and engineered to deliver the most relevant results for a given keyword rather than comprehensive results showing every instance of a keyword, which is the focus for compliance search products.

But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t offer that - centrally, at scale - and own a key chunk of the compliance archiving market right now. It’s hard to argue that’s outside Google’s focus after they spent $625 million to acquire email archiver Postini two years ago. “I would never say never, let’s put it that way,” said Mistri.

In the meantime, Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Brian Babineau added in an email to Storage Soup, “if customers are transitioning from file servers to multiple Sharepoint sites, we definitely think GSA can help connect those information sources. In a recent ESG SharePoint survey, 49% of Sharepoint users also leveraged GSA supporting our thesis that Sharepoint sites needed to be connected by an enterprise search solution.”

SunGard to open arms - and data centers - to healthcare IT

Washington D.C. isn’t the only place where people are paying a lot of attention to healthcare these days. The IT world sees healthcare as a soon-to-be booming market, thanks to billions of dollars set aside for electronic healthcare records and procedures in this year’s economic stimulus bill. So it’s no surprise that vendors are positioning themselves to ride the coming wave of digitization in the healthcare field.

SunGard Availability Services is among those making a big push into healthcare. This week it revealed a partnership with IT outsource provider PhoenixHealth Systems to offer data center outsourcing for hospitals, and it will soon launch a service for archiving medical images based on a partnership with InSiteOne Inc.

The InSiteOne-based service, called Secure to Disk, will include compression, encryption, deduplication, audit trails, and content addressing specifically for secure, compliant storage of medical images. The partnership with PhoenixHealth is for hospitals and healthcare centers looking to outsource the entire data center, with a focus on application delivery and availability, although data storage and disaster recovery features are also part of that service.

Glenn Boland, national vice president of healthcare for SunGard Availability Services, says the two services might also be combined in a hybrid public-private cloud - the InSiteOne service would use a shared infrastructure, while services offered through PhoenixHealth use a dedicated infrastructure that the customer must supply or contract for.

SunGard and competitors such as Iron Mountain and HP feel hospitals are especially good candidates to outsource processes such as DR and online archiving services because many hospitals prefer to focus on core medical competencies.

“Even institutions that feel they can house applications better, faster and cheaper in-house are probably taking a harder and harder look at where they spend their storage dollars,” Boland says.

SourceOne stokes Symantec-EMC archiving rivalry

EMCers are talking up their SourceOne archiving platform today, and their rivals at Symantec are doing the same. But while EMC extols the virtues of its EmailXtender replacement, Symantec is giving EmailXtender customers a come-hither look.

In an open letter to EmailXtender customers, Symantec asks: Why go with a version 1 product lacking integrated SharePoint and file archiving support when you can switch to an established product?

The letter promises EMC customers an quick and easy migration to Symantec Enterprise Vault. Enterprise Vault senior product manager Dave Campbell says migration services are available for customers of any archiving product, but obviously EmailXtender users are in the bull’s eye of the target.

“We want to present a turnkey package for migrating from EmailXtender, Zantaz, whatever,” Campbell said. “If you have 2,000 to 5,000 users with two or three years of data in archives, you’re a good candidate for migration services. We’re getting multiple requests each week from customers looking to migrate off legacy systems, and more of those requests are from EmailXtender customers than usual.”

The migration services include a system Healtcheck to identify best practices as well as potential failures and errors, and an architectural assessment to understand what is archived and insure a proper chain of custody for archived data. Campbell says most of the migration can be done remotely by Symantec Global Services.

The migration services are not free, however, and Symantec isn’t promising discounts to get EMC customers to switch. Campbell says the pricing depends on how much information is in the legacy archive.

Bottom line: Symantec is trying to get at SourceOne in the crib before it gets a chance to grow up.

Shoah Foundation tames 8 PB with tape and automation

Add this as a point in the ‘tape’ column if you’re scoring the ancient debate at home.

The Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg to preserve Holocaust survivors’ narratives after Schindler’s List and now a part of the University of Southern California, has conducted interviews with thousands of survivors in 56 countries. The Foundation has 52,000 interviews that amount to 105,000 hours of footage.

CTO Sam Gustman says the footage was originally shot on analog video cameras, then converted to digital betacam and MPEGs for distribution online. It currently amounts to 135 TB. However, the Foundation is converting the footage to Motion JPEG 2000, which will create bigger files–about 4 PB of data, Gustman estimated. Each video will be copied twice, bringing the total to 8 PB.

Gustman says the Foundation received a $2 million donation of SL8500 tape libraries, Sun STK  6540 arrays and servers from Sun Microsystems in June. The Foundation has an automated transcoding system running on the servers, and that takes up the 140 TB of 6540 disk capacity for workspace. Sun’s SAM-FS software will automate the migration of data within the system, to the 6540 and then to the SL8500 silo for long-term storage.

We’re hearing a lot in the industry these days about rich content applications such as this one moving to clustered disk systems, but Gustman said disk costs too much for the Foundation’s budget.  He sees the potential for an eventual move to disk storage, but “disk is still too expensive–four to five times the total cost of ownership, mostly for powerand cooling.”

Another advantage to the T10000 tape drives the Foundation plans to use is that they will eliminate having to migrate the entire collection to disk during copying, transcoding and technology refreshes. One T10000 drive can make copies or do conversions directly between drives in the robot, and the virtualization layer with SAM-FS means that can happen transparently.

However, as an organization charged with the historic preservation of records, Gustman agreed with others I’ve talked to about this subject in saying that there’s still no great way to preserve digital information in the long term. “The problem with digital preservation right now is that you have to put energy into it–you can’t just stick it in a box and hope it’s there 100 years from now,” he said. “Maybe there’ll be something eventually that you don’t have to put energy into, but it doesn’t exist yet.”

Plasmon to be taken private

Several weeks after recommending to investors that they approve a bid by a private equity company to take over the struggling maker of optical storage media, Plasmon has been bought by an unidentified U.S. firm.

As a result of the deal, which earlier reports valued at $25 million, Plasmon has become Plasmon Holdings LLC, and will move its headquarters from the U.K. to the U.S. Plasmon will continue its strategy under CEO Steven Murphy of fitting its products in to users’ overall long-term archiving strategies (bolstered by partnerships with NetApp and IBM-FileNet) rather than focusing solely on the speeds and feeds of its optical media.

Murphy has been here before. He was CEO of Softek when it spun out of Fujitsu and went private in 2004. Last year, IBM acquired Softek for an undisclosed amount, and folded Softek’s host-based Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) data migration software into its IBM Global Services (IGS) division,.