Litigation Support Solution
Exablox can help legal IT organizations manage fast growing eDiscovery and litigation support information
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Litigation support is a critical element of legal IT. Attorneys representing clients in litigation suits sift through huge amounts of information for each case. Behind the scenes, the firm's IT team is responsible for managing, protecting, and delivering roundthe- clock access to this large quantity of data in a cost-effective manner. This storage management problem has become a more prevalent issue in recent years as firms move away from paper records and move towards electronically stored information (ESI).
Challenges
Given the fast paced nature of the legal world, attorneys expect to have prompt access to all of their files – regardless of whether the data was imported several years back or just minutes ago. A lawyer could approach the IT team at any time with a 2TB hard drive filled with client information and expect the data to be available immediately thereafter. These requirements make it nearly impossible to provision and allocate storage resources in advance. Each new case adds unpredictable amount of additional information to the storage network, often a high-performing but expensive SAN, which leads to significant unplanned capital expenses as the IT team scrambles to find space for the data. Even after the case is over, the data needs to be kept online for future use. A case may go inactive, but attorneys expect the data to remain available so that it will be easily accessible if the case reopens. These requirements place costly and complex demands on legal IT teams.
Solution
OneBlox & OneSystem
Exablox delivers a scalable storage solution, OneBlox, a powerful yet simple scale-out storage appliance, coupled with OneSystem, a cloud-based storage management system. The solution is built from ground-up to deliver an infrastructure that integrates advanced storage features while simplifying storage management. OneBlox is a purpose-built appliance with enterprise-grade features built-in such as continuous data protection, inline deduplication, encryption, and disaster recovery. With nearly all storage management tasks automated there is no need for expertise to setup and operate. The unique scale-out, multi-purpose storage appliance consolidates primary, backup, and archival data into a single, simple- to-use file storage infrastructure.
Exablox Addresses Litigation Support
Exablox offers legal firms an efficient approach to storage infrastructure. By implementing Exablox's solution for litigation support, legal firms can eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks associated with capacity scaling in traditional storage environments. Exablox tackles the struggles faced by the IT team in three main ways:
Scale effortlessly as needed
- Scale one disk and one appliance at a time, at any time
- Avoid overprovisioning and eliminate upfront investments by adding capacity granularly, one disk at a time
- Use the new aggregate capacity immediately for applications and users
- Bring your own drives to the OneBlox device locking in retail prices and avoid paying $1000s per TB in vendor premiums for commodity disks
- Mix-and-match drive capacity and drive types (SAS, SATA) within the same OneBlox appliance for added flexibility
Dramatically simplify the storage management
- Allocate capacity instantaneously because there are no RAID, volumes, or LUNs to configure.
- Eliminate legacy RAID parity with replication that efficiently protects data from multiple disk or node failures legal
- Remove and replace failed disks (or nodes in the cluster) with no disruption to data services and no reconfiguration of storage
- Securely manage on-premises OneBlox storage system from any browser with OneSystem
- Experience a simplified, yet powerful, storage management workflow that is visual, point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and directly actionable
Safeguard valuable digital assets
- Protect data with automatic encryption – all information written to OneBlox is encrypted (in-line) with AES 256 before written to physical disk
- OneBlox architecture protects from dual disk or two node failures
- Recover previous versions of files easily through deduplicated, continuous snapshots without relying on a full restore from tape backups
- Guard against ring or entire site failure with real-time remote replication. The WAN usage is optimized as only the changed and de-duplicated information is replicated to the remote OneBlox ring
Conclusion
The unpredictable capacity requirements for litigation data combined with the high standards for availability and security place significant pressure on legal IT teams. Exablox offers a unique solution with its OneBlox and OneSystem that alleviates much of this stress. The solution requires very little configuration and the intuitive and user-friendly OneSystem allows for simple management of OneBlox appliances. The scale-out architecture of OneBlox, along with it's focus on high availability and built-in data protection and recovery mechanisms, make it an ideal solution to solve the challenges faced by legal IT.
Download the Exablox Litigation Support Solution Brief Datasheet (PDF).