Digital Reef Publishes First Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark and Results

20 August 2010

Technology Companies Fill Need for Performance and Scalability Measurement; Announce First-Ever Benchmark at ILTA Conference

Digital Reef, a leading software provider of the first massively scalable and open solutions for eDiscovery and digital information governance, today announced the industry’s first Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark (SPB). The Open SPB was established to fill a void in the industry of a true standard of measurement of eDiscovery performance.

Digital Reef partnered with BlueArc Corporation, a leading provider of high performance network storage systems, to create the benchmark which measures specific eDiscovery technology attributes based on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). Today, law firms and in-house corporate legal teams are faced with more and more litigation; at the same time, they are presented with an explosion of digital information to collect, cull, process, analyze, and produce to support eDiscovery. With this new Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark, customers, prospects and vendors now have the ability to benchmark the speed and scalability of eDiscovery in order to evaluate their selections.

Industry expert, Barry Murphy, founder of the eDiscovery Journal states, “Customers want to make apples-to-apples comparisons of eDiscovery solutions in the marketplace. Speed and scale of eDiscovery applications have been particularly thorny because they are both critically important features and yet very difficult to measure. That Digital Reef and BlueArc have partnered to create an open, replicable performance benchmark will be of great value to customers evaluating enterprise-grade solutions.”

The Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark consists of a series of standard tests, off-the-shelf infrastructure, and open data sets to measure overall performance across the EDRM. This announcement and first release, called SPB I, tests for Information Management, Identification, and Processing areas of the EDRM. The next release, called SPB II, will expand the tests to Analysis and Production areas of the EDRM. Additionally, the Open SPB will standardize and make available three data set profiles to represent a mixture of legal and eDiscovery Case scenarios together with standard server, middleware and storage infrastructure.

Many legal firms, service providers and in-house counsel are under increased pressure to process more information while also reducing eDiscovery timeframes and cost. Therefore Digital Reef embarked on the SPB in order to raise awareness about the importance of speed and scalability and allow end-users to meet these increasing demands.
“BlueArc’s approach to scalability, with Digital Reef’s approach to eDiscovery software, delivers the next generation of eDiscovery infrastructure. BlueArc helps to remove I/O bottlenecks with its industry-leading, high performance storage,” added Jeff Greenwald, senior solutions manager for eDiscovery, BlueArc.

The SPB I benchmark performance testing uses three different data profiles to represent an eDiscovery case matter, a representative complex matter, and a test to measure the creation of an enterprise file map to support early data assessments.

The Open SPB I Processing Tests for eDiscovery case matter and a representative complex matter are based on the following standard infrastructure configurations:

• Dell, 2.6-3Ghz, 16GB Servers
• 1 Gigabit Ethernet Network
• Standard Linux middleware and operating system
• BlueArc network storage systems
• The actual number of servers is flexible based on available core and memory. The Digital Reef dynamic software architecture has the capability to utilize any number of core/memory configurations.

An additional processing test for measuring the creation of an enterprise file map to support early data assessments was based on standard Dell rack mount servers and solid state storage. All SPB I Processing Test results for the latest release (3.1) of the Digital Reef eDiscovery Solution span from 7TB to 273TB per day. All the data profiles are available to customers and partners to support running the SPB I on Digital Reef and other eDiscovery products. In the future, SPB II will add results for Analysis and Production Tests.

“This is a significant achievement in eDiscovery that benefits both our customers and partners. With an open benchmark, customers now have a way to measure overall scalability and performance in the context of the EDRM. Clearly, results show that Digital Reef can handle the largest of processing demands and continue to dynamically expand to handle future demands,” said David P. Butler, vice president of marketing, Digital Reef, Inc.

Digital Reef’s eDiscovery Solution, based on the Virtual Governance Warehouse v 3.1 platform, is the only solution on the market that contains real-time, dynamic software scaling and resource management on industry standard servers. Unlike appliance-based solutions where physical boxes need to be “daisy-chained” together to expand, the Digital Reef platform is software-based and performance is dynamically increased by activating additional processor cores in single or multi-servers on-the-fly. Customers have complete control over managing performance based on the processing and analysis demands.

For more details about the Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark, including how to receive a copy of the data sets, a white paper authored by eDiscovery Journal is available at: http://www.digitalreefinc.com/go/performance and on Blue Arc’s site. Given its open nature, customers and partners can use the same configuration and data profiles to evaluate and optimize their eDiscovery solutions. Digital Reef will also be showcasing SPB I and inviting discussion at this year’s ILTA conference in Las Vegas, NV from August 22-26 at booth # 910.