RenewData Uses HDS Multitiered Storage Virtualization

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced that Renew Data Corp., provider of services for the discovery, archiving and governance of electronically stored information (ESI), is using Hitachi solutions to move, protect and manage data.

RenewData helps corporations and law firms proactively manage exceedingly large amounts of data often used in litigation. Ensuring that every record associated with a particular case is securely housed accurately, filtered and expediently retrievable requires a forensically sound chain of custody and ample technology horsepower.

Given RenewData’s core business, deploying a storage architecture that could scale with its business became a necessity. To keep the business running smoothly and maintain client satisfaction, RenewData’s IT infrastructure needs to be unyielding to failure or performance issues. To evolve its growing storage landscape, RenewData wanted to consolidate with a single partner capable of meeting high performance, cost-efficient needs, with a push for standardization and simplicity in the architecture. Additionally, the solution needed to maximize computing power, handle the strain of running at high throughput rates and replace labor intensive, cumbersome data movement activities with highly automated ones.

Before implementing Hitachi solutions, more than a petabyte of data was being stored on equipment from half a dozen vendors across 15 different storage area network islands. No storage was virtualized, management of the SAN had continued to be a challenge and the company’s traditional network attached storage (NAS) systems could not handle the company’s I/O requirements. At peak times, RenewData had to delete an average of 31 terabytes an hour, with constant ejecting and inserting of tapes and disks just to keep up with the demands of the business.

Hitachi Data Systems Virtualization:
Flexibility, Automation, and Improved Performance
RenewData implemented two distinct architectures based on Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, virtualizing Hitachi NAS Platform models on the front end and the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family on the back. For the processing and e-discovery platform environment, four Hitachi NAS Platform systems sitting in front of the Universal Storage Platform take advantage of block-level storage, while Adaptable Modular Storage units hold SAS and SATA drives for two flexible tiers of storage.

“We were literally walking terabytes of data between several hundred machines every day, logging each touch point, reprovisioning LUNs as they moved, deleting almost 100 terabytes an hour, hammering throughput,” said Doyal Alexander, chief technology officer, RenewData. “Now our process is entirely flexible and automated. In a 24/7 operation, we’ve gone from needing five or seven staff to move and protect data to a single person per shift, and we reduced wait time for quality assurance from 120 minutes to less than a minute. Hitachi technology proved to be simple, elegant and easy to manage, and the storage economics of this type of solution are fantastic.”

By leveraging Hitachi virtualization solutions,
RenewData has seen additional results, including:

• 90 percent improvement while performing extraction and targeted processing
• 40 percent efficiency gain per raw gigabyte in NAS Platform performance
• Setup time cut by 66 percent, for smaller 200GB data jobs
• Improvement in scale under pressure for a job 17 times larger than infrastructure was designed to handle
• Entirely flexible and automated processes