Originally posted by: TonyPearson

I saw two presentations worth discussing here in this blog.

Angus MacDonald, CEO of Mathon Systems,presented "Litigation Readiness: How prepared are you for the demands of eDiscovery?"

The process of eDiscovery is to take a large volume of data and get the small bits of relevance, as it relatesto a case, investigation or litigation. In 2004, there were 64 billion emails per day, and this is expected to be 103 billion by 2008. There are growing concerns about the "spoliation" of evidence, which I thought was a typo,until I looked it up. He encouraged everyone to check out the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, which is trying to standardize the wayIT and legal communication with each other.

The problem is often miscommunication over semantics and terminology. For example, in eDiscovery, the term"production" describes the delivery of relevant documents to a judge or opposing party. This may involve printingthem out on paper, delivering them electronically in their original format, or converting to a more standardelectronic format like Adobe PDF. The judge or opposing party reserves the right to request how they want thedocuments produced. Of course, in any format other than the original format, authenticity needs to be affirmed.

He gave two example lawsuits related to this.

• In Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, Zubulake was awarded $29 million because UBS stored old emails on backup tapes, rather than an archiving system, and could not locate seven of these backup tapes. This is not the first time I have seen some IT department, or some legal department, think that keeping backups of email repositories for many years is the same as keeping an "archive".
• In Coleman Holdings v. Morgan Stanley, Coleman was awarded $1.45 billion because the judge felt that Morgan Stanley failed to do proper eDiscovery. This was after they tried to reconstruct their email system from 5000 old backup tapes.

Angus suggests identifying the types of documents most often requested, and start planning from there.In an interesting twist, the CEO/CFO/CIO might go to jail if the IT department doesn't do something correctly, so perhaps IT managers will now get the respect/funding/technology they need to get the job done.

Bruce Kornfeld, Compellent Technologies, presented "Building Systems that Scale: Imagining the one Petabyte per Admin management ratio."

Bruce did a good job staying generic, and not mentioning his company's products too much. Specifically, Compellentmakes a frame similar to what IBM used to call the "SAN Integration Server". Back in 2003, IBM introduced the SAN Volume Controller, which had no disk, and the "SAN Integration Server" which had controller + disk. What IBM learned was that customers prefer the diskless model, minimizing the amount of disk that has to be purchased from the original vendor, and instead opting to have the freedom to choose any vendor they like for the managed capacity.

An interesting feature of the Compellent solution is that they chop up the virtual disk into 2MB pieces, and allow these pieces to be moved automatically from high-speed (FC) to low-speed (SATA) disk, based on their reference frequency. This is similar to HSM, but at the block level, rather than the file level.

Every advantage Bruce listed for his box already exists from IBM: improved capacity planning, improved performance, ease of data migration, flexible volumes, and a single pane of glass GUI administration tool.

Perhaps more interesting were the questions from the audience:

• Q1. Do you have any customers that have 1PB of your solution? No, we have several in the 200-500TB range.
• Q2. You only have a single two-node cluster, can we have more clusters? No, that is all we support, but if you need that you would have to go to one of the major storage vendors (like IBM).
• Q3. Do we have to buy Compellent storage to go with the Compellent controllers? Yes, it is designed so it is an integrated solution. If you need to virtualize your existing storage, you have to go to one of the major storage vendors (like IBM).
• Q4. Having data migrate automatically from FC to SATA behind the scenes lowers performance and raises the risk of disk failure? Our box is designed for inactive data, so performance is not an issue.
• Q5. How do you protect against double-disk failures? We don't, and these would be even more detrimental to our solution than traditional solutions. Other vendors offer RAID6, but we don't have that yet.

technorati tags: IBM, Litigation, Readiness, eDiscovery, spoliation, Angus MacDonald, Matheon Systems, Bruce Kornfeld, Compellent, RAID6, SAN Volume Controller