eDirect Impact Using Reldata

RELDATA Inc. announced that eDirect Impact LLC (eDI), provider of litigation data hosting and support services, is using RELDATA’s Unified Storage System to cost-effectively scale its growing, multi-vendor storage infrastructure. RELDATA’s solution helps eDI to remain competitive by meeting its legal customers’ needs and service level agreements without passing on higher costs to them.

Since the onset of e-discovery in the mid-1990s, law firms have hosted an increasing amount of client data, burdening them with the complexities of data management. eDI’s SaaS offering (Software as a Service) is a service that allows law firms and corporate legal departments to leverage an IT infrastructure thereby reducing the costs and capital investments associated with storing litigation related data. As a result, its customers benefit from enhanced data security, advanced technology, customized workflow, additional support, and cost savings.

The company stores its customers’ files and email archives, which are often many terabytes in size, and indexes them by content so they can be searched to unearth relevant data. This process can increase the initial storage volume by a factor of nine. As a result, the company, which currently hosts over 350 terabytes of data for law firms and corporations nationwide, is experiencing a 35 percent annual increase in its storage requirements.

"We needed a solution that would satisfy our growing storage requirements while still enabling us to utilize our existing multi-vendor storage environment," said Brian Maurer, CIO of eDirect Impact. "Cost was also a compelling factor, and one important reason for choosing RELDATA was its unique Save as You Grow pricing model; its software is licensed at the system level, by feature, not by capacity, and there are no minimum or fixed bundles. When you calculate the cost savings based on this pricing, they’re incredible."

RELDATA’s open architecture was another factor in eDI’s decision. "Typically, committing to a particular storage solution restricts your future options," said Maurer. "Choosing RELDATA has had the opposite result, adding new flexibility. It gives us the freedom to choose a mixture of arrays to suit our exact needs while fully leveraging our existing storage investments."

With RELDATA’s IP-based management infrastructure meeting its storage needs, eDI has no need for a separate storage network, and the backup for both NAS and SAN is covered in a single process. In addition, storage management for both their block and file applications is managed from a single interface, which reduces management time and complexity. As a result, the company can manage a huge amount of data with minimal IT staff. The ability to unify all third-party vendors under the RELDATA umbrella, and the resulting infrastructure and cost reductions, gives eDI a substantial competitive edge.

"eDirect Impact is an industry innovator and leader that analyzes massive quantities of data. They efficiently deal with the associated management challenges, infrastructure requirements, explosive data growth, scalability and cost," said Victor Walker, CEO, RELDATA. "It is an honor to partner with eDirect in providing a cost-effective way to address all of these challenges. As eDI’s storage requirements expand we will aggressively support their growth, leadership and success."