Elastic Clouds, Archiving and E-Discovery
A key aspect of managing archiving / e-discovery costs with the cloud, whether it is on the public cloud or a private on-premises cloud, is the ability to control hardware costs by matching it with the required workload through elastic scaling. In this article I will talk about why elasticity is important information governance and the different cloud computing layers (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) that are required for a cloud computing solution.
Both archiving and e-discovery are well-suited for elastic cloud solutions due to the amount of one-time work needed. For archiving this often occurs when migrating from one system to another; while for e-discovery, this often occurs during collection and processing which is associated with individual matters. During any of these tasks, a large amount of processing power may be needed to collect and process data, whether it is several gigabytes or several hundred terabytes. In a traditional solution, hardware resources are fixed over the short-term meaning that either you cannot easily obtain additional needed resources or you are budgeted for peak loads and have additional carrying costs when not performing those functions. Using an elastic cloud-based solution allows organizations to match their hardware with their processing needs, scaling up when needed and scaling down or redeploying when not needed. At ZL Technologies, our customers run cloud environments ranging from several servers to several hundred servers, easily adding and removing servers as necessary for archiving and e-discovery.
To be truly effective, a cloud-based system must be cloud-enabled at several layers:
- Infrastructure – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform – Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Application – Software as a Service (SaaS)
Cloud infrastructure is generally easy to obtain, whether it is on Amazon’s public cloud or a VMware-powered private cloud; however, this takes advantage of only the most basic resource pooling benefits of cloud computing. By scaling at the application layer, a SaaS / PaaS solution enables true elasticity where servers can not only be easily brought online, but also brought into the worker pool to share tasks and then be redeployed when the tasks have been completed. Today, cloud-based elasticity at the SaaS and PaaS layers generally needs to be built directly into the archiving / e-discovery solution.
ZL Unified Archive®’s success as a scalable archiving and e-discovery solution (see IDC case study) is based on its ability to scale at the application and platform layers using ZL’s Globally Redundant, Integrated and Distributed (GRIDTM) platform and applications. The GRIDTM platform and protocol was developed by ZL to handle carrier-class Internet and mobile deployments that manage 100,000s of users and millions of emails per day for some of the world’s largest telecoms. This same technology allows ZL’s Fortune 500 customers to effectively manage hundreds of terabytes and billions of documents in the cloud.
If you are interested in learning more about scaling archiving and e-discovery in the cloud, please contact us at ZL Technologies for an in-depth discussion of offerings and case studies. Or visit us at the upcoming IQPC conference for Oil and Gas Companies in Houston. We will be there discussing both cloud computing on day 1 and how to move from reactive e-discovery to proactive e-discovery on day 2.
May 27th, 2011 at 5:35 pm
[...] response, corporations have begun to look into new ways to approach the e-discovery problem. First, they have reached out to create internal or external clouds for e-discovery. They have also incorporated archiving into their e-discovery process, a move which [...]