Index Engines, in enterprise discovery solutions, announced the eDiscovery Edition of its Tape Engine which includes new features to automate the eDiscovery process for offline tape content. The eDiscovery Edition makes enterprise litigation readiness a reality by automating tape data sorting and object extraction – eliminating the time consuming and expensive process of restoring tapes in order to begin discovery. Using patent-pending technology, the Index Engines Edition directly indexes data on offline tapes without ever restoring it. As a result, corporate legal teams can now instantly search the metadata as well as full text content of difficult-to-access data archives and extract the relevant files and email in order to respond quickly to litigation requests and to mitigate risk.

“Many companies have volumes and volumes of unsearchable data locked in proprietary tape backup formats that they have accumulated over time or through mergers and acquisitions,” said Jeffrey Fehrman, president, Electronic Evidence Labs, a division of ONSITE3. “The tremendous risk of the unknown contents of this data has prompted many organizations to wisely implement proactive litigation readiness processes. However, the discovery of this archived data on offline tapes is extremely costly and time consuming. The Index Engines eDiscovery solution unlocks this data without the time and expense of restoring each backup tape to search it. As a result, companies can now ensure litigation readiness through an automated approach that is both cost effective and fast.”

Index Engines Enterprise eDiscovery Edition is the only solution on the market that can directly index offline tape content and make it fully searchable without having to restore the tapes. This platform understands common tape backup formats (ArcServe, TSM, NetBackup, Backup Exec, and NetWorker) and directly indexes unstructured files and email, even back five to 10 years. Once this data is indexed, it is immediately searchable in order to find relevant content enabling companies to quickly find “smoking guns” in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks or even months.

The Index Engines Enterprise eDiscovery Edition includes the following new features to automate the offline tape discovery process:
Tape Library Support: The use of libraries in litigation support is critical due to the large volumes of tapes that have been generated over time, or inherited through mergers and acquisitions. The use of individual tape drives to support discovery projects is not practical. Index Engines solution supports all common tape libraries for the ingestion of the large volumes of offline tape data. Tape libraries are connected to the Index Engines appliance via a SCSI or fibre channel connection and an auto-configure utility recognizes the specifications of the library and its internal tape management software in order to automate the cataloging and indexing of tape cartridges.
Tape Management Utility: Offline tapes are typically not well organized or even labeled, so it is difficult to know the proper order of tapes when inserting them into a tape library. The Index Engines platform contains a new tape management module that automatically generates a catalog of the tapes loaded in a library. Once a catalog is generated indexing will occur across all tapes in the library in a logical fashion, or on backup sets selected from the catalog.
Automated Extraction Module: Retrieving relevant content from tape requires that the contents first be restored using the original backup software used to generate the tape. In many cases, the backup software may no longer be available, making this a complicated process. Email adds another layer of complexity because full mailboxes or databases must be extracted before having access to relevant emails. The Index Engines platform automates the process of restoring relevant tape data. Following a simple metadata and/or content search to determine the relevant content, files and/or email can be selected and extracted from tape without using the original backup software. The Index Engines solution eliminates the need for the original backup software application and enables companies to only restore relevant content versus significant volumes of useless data.

• “With this new version our enterprise clients can now proactively address the liability contained in their offline tapes without having to spend $1,800 per gigabyte to process tapes,” said Jim McGann, vice president of marketing, Index Engines. “Automation of the complete process, from managing tapes to ripping the relevant data off these tapes, is now practical.”

The Index Engines Enterprise eDiscovery Platform available now with pricing starting at $50,000. The new Extraction Module is available as an add-on to the core product at a price of $25,000.

Index Engines