Storage Prepares for Court

The legal and storage worlds will come together in New York City this week, as vendors unveil a plethora of products around content monitoring, CDP, and software as a service (SaaS) at the LegalTech show.

As CIOs and IT managers struggle with the storage impact of the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and an ever more litigious corporate landscape, vendors are eyeing new opportunities.

First up is Mimosa, which is adding content monitoring to its Nearpoint email archiving software. "It's a software module that sits on top of Nearpoint," explains T.M. Ravi, the Mimosa CEO, adding that the module generates email alerts based on predefined keywords and phrases.

Examples of alerts include identifying instances of sexual harassment or intellectual property "leakage" concerning sensitive product information. The content-monitoring module, which will be announced and made generally available tomorrow, is priced at $16 per user.

Mimosa will also be cranking up its partner strategy this week, announcing integration deals with e-discovery specialists RenewData and Index Engines. RenewData will now take information from tape and older email formats such as Groupwise and Lotus Domino and convert it into an Exchange format that can be ingested by the Nearpoint hardware.Like RenewData, Index Engines will also convert data from tape, which can then be stored in the Exchange-based Nearpoint archive, according to Ravi.

Another Exchange specialist upgrading its wares this week is Lucid8, which will be demo'ing version 2.0 of its DigiScope e-discovery software.

The vendor has enhanced the previous version of DigiScope to execute queries across multiple sources, such as backup copies, while working with the vendor's DigiVault CDP product. Lucid8 also has made the solution easier to use with Outlook.

Pricing for DigiScope 2.0, which will be available later this month, starts at $595, although this will rise to $759 in April.

Other vendors getting busy this week include email archiving vendor AXS-One, which announced a technology partnership with Renew Data today, and MediConnect, which will enhance its RapidRetrieve medical records system.Despite the myriad "whistles and bells" on offer at LegalTech this week, one IT manager told Byte and Switch that usability remains his primary concern when it comes to e-discovery software.

"For us, ease of use and integration are the most important things," says Ed Leonard, CTO of movie studio Dreamworks. "Being able to set policy and implement that quickly is key."

The exec, who would not reveal which products Dreamworks uses for e-discovery and security, thinks that his job is easier than the jobs of many of his counterparts. "We're a relatively small business of 12,000 people, it's not too difficult for us to stay on top of e-discovery, compared to a company of 100,000 people."

Other vendors making announcements this week include Attenex, which will introduce a data assessment tool called Snapshot Review, and StoredIQ, which will upgrade its eponymous appliance for identifying and collecting sensitive information and applying legal holds.

With Version 4.5 of its hardware, StoredIQ claims to offer users the ability to automate this process down to a single mouse click.StoredIQ has not yet revealed pricing and availability for its souped-up appliance, although Attenex's Snapshot Review will be available this month priced at $50,000.

Last week also saw a flurry of announcements from vendors keen to get their news out ahead of the LegalTech show. Clearwell Systems launched version 3.0 of its E-Discovery Platform , which is resold by HP with that vendor's Integrated Archive Platform. Clearwell has added: 64-bit architecture for its appliances; centralized multicase management for one or clustered appliances aimed at boosting savings on costly legal help during the e-discovery process; improved data reduction capabilities; iterative searching via multiple elements (across file types, groups, domains, custodian names, organization, for instance); and a broader scope of data types and foreign languages supported.

Clearwell claims to compete primarily against service providers like Iron Mountain's Stratify or Autonomy. The vendor claims a differentiator is the ability to manage "hundreds" of cases simultaneously with policy integration.

Clearwell E-Discovery Platform 3.0 is presently shipping. Pricing is set according to the amount of data analyzed. A license for use with 100 Gbytes, for instance, starts at $65,000 including service and support.Fortiva, for example, took the wraps off its SmartStore archive, which it is touting as a low-cost "litigation readiness" solution.

The vendor is pushing SmartStore as a SaaS solution for users seeking to archive email, while enforcing policies and litigation holds without adding additional hardware.Pricing for SmartStore, which is available now, starts at $1.10 per user per month for a company with 1,000 users.

Another archiving specialist busy last week was Mirapoint, which launched new versions of its Message Server email appliance and Razor Gate security hardware. The Message Server S6000 doubles the storage capacity of Mirapoint's previous high-end device, the 5000, to 8 Tbytes, according to Alan Elliot, Mirapoint's vice president of marketing.

"This allows support for larger mailbox sizes," he explains. "Fundamentally, there's a need to retain data because email has become the archive of record for most business transactions."

The vendor has also boosted the performance of its email security boxes with the launch of the RazorGate 6000, scanning more than 1 million messages an hour for spam, viruses, and hacking attempts. This is double the throughput of its predecessor, the RazorGate 500, according to Elliot.

Pricing for Mirapoint's Message Server S6000 starts at $10,500, with pricing for the RazorGate 6000 starting at $8,300. Both boxes are available now.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.