QDiscovery Enlists EMC For Its Performance And Data Defense

At QDiscovery, we like to think of ourselves as the concierge of the e-discovery service market. Our team of 35 employees in New London, CT provides electronic data and document management solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments throughout the United States.

We assist our customers with end-to-end discovery litigation support including presentations, document management and e-discovery to use in and out of the courtroom. We dedicate ourselves to the best possible customer experience by developing relationships that center on trust.

That’s why it’s so important that we manage our data in a safe and secure environment, allowing information to be freely available when the client needs it. The QDiscovery data center houses up to 80TBs of legal documentation such as court papers, depositions or video surveillance footage. All of this can be requested on short notice to support a client’s case. We have some cases online that range from half a gigabyte to several terabytes. We can have up to 80 or 100 projects online at any given time.

We began noticing performance issues in our system a few years ago. While we thought we had a storage issue, we quickly learned the problem was with the way we were backing up data. And the problem wasn’t so much in the size of the data as it was the millions of different types of files we were backing up.

After a six-month engagement with EMC consultants, we selected a comprehensive storage and backup solution that includes the EMC VNX5400 with Data Encryption at Rest (D@RE) and two EMC Data Domain DD2500 systems with EMC NetWorker software. So now our file storage is made up of the dual VNX systems at two co-locations – one in Connecticut and the other in Massachusetts. Our Data Domain systems back up and compress all our information, packing data into as little as one-thirtieth of the space it could otherwise require, using the industry’s leading solution for de-duplication.

With this combination, we can process a wide variety of data faster than ever before. And for less money. Instead of having skilled attorneys waste billable hours sorting through documents in a linear fashion, we use our EMC infrastructure to quickly combine emails together for analysis, or look at similar documents to identify differences to locate the right file. Everything is geared towards making that evaluation go smoother, faster and with more consistency.

And, while we initially engaged with EMC to fix our backup problem, the project exposed us to a wider range of technologies that have helped our business – such as our VNX storage array. EMC VNX, combined with Data Domain, solved our need for speed, and security. Every hard drive associated with VNX is encrypted. Whether data is being accessed from the laptop of one of our clients or it’s at rest in our data center, it’s safely encrypted. We found this to be a terrific solution.

In addition to the hardware, the EMC consultancy service really brought it all together for us. They took the time to understand our challenges. They analyzed everything we shared and came back with a tailored solution that’s been rock solid ever since.

The key to QDiscovery’s success is our customer satisfaction. But to make that happen, our solutions have to be reliable, secure and available. Our customers commonly ask us about our data center. Where is their information living? How safe is it? How quickly can they find the right data when they need it? Our relationship with EMC provides a positive answer to all those questions.

About the Author: Helen Geib