Paragon Legal Technology Support Taps Isilon

EMC Corporation announced that
Paragon Legal Technology Support, LLC, which provides law firms and corporations
with litigation support services, replaced its NetApp, Inc.‘s storage environment with
EMC Isilon scale-out storage to manage its big data requirements.

Isilon has enabled Paragon to accelerate the collection of forensic
evidence and streamline the company’s e-discovery projects. It has also
provided Paragon the scalability it needed to grow its expanding
cloud-based business.

Customer Benefits:

• Performance: Isilon
  enabled sub-second response times for retrieving key relevant documents from
  millions of pages, a 6X improvement from its previous NetApp storage solution,
  driving millions of dollars in new revenue.
• ROI: Higher productivity, increased efficiency and substantial cost
  savings allowed Paragon to achieve a return on its investment in Isilon in just
  18 months.
• Administration: With Isilon’s single point of management, Paragon reduced IT
  administration by lowering costs by at least one FTE.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:
Paragon’s staff must pore through as many as 30 million pages of
documentation, emails and other data to support its clients in litigation. All
collected forensic evidence is stored in an unalterable digital image format,
creating case files as large as 9TB or more. The firm’s previous NetApp storage
lacked the performance and scalability to support these big data requirements.
During one of the firm’s most important cases, the NetApp storage ran out of
capacity, stalling the discovery process and threatening to compromise the
client relationship.

To resolve this roadblock and support uninhibited big data
growth for the long term, Paragon replaced its NetApp storage with Isilon
S-Series and X-Series systems. The S-Series is configured with flash drives to
provide fast performance for Paragon’s SQL Server database. The
X-Series stores tagged image file format (TIFF) and all other electronic
content used in the discovery process. The Isilon solution supports Paragon’s
IPRO e-discovery tool, Mindseye TunnelVision search and assessment tool and
iCONECT XERA database management tool for hosted client services.

Paragon has improved performance of content searches,
while enabling virtually unlimited scalability to take on cases rivaling the
biggest players in the industry. Moreover, the performance and scalability of
Isilon has opened the door for Paragon to expand its hosted services with SaaS, and IaaS, offering
growth opportunities never before possible.

Paul Cowley, CEO and co-founder, Paragon Legal Technology Support,
said: "Our clients often
require us to filter through massive volumes of big data that might span 5,000
documents and millions of pages just to find one or two documents of evidence
that determine the success of a case. Isilon’s speed and reliability enable us
to respond to practically any request, which provides a competitive advantage
that has helped drive millions of dollars in new revenue.

"When an attorney
initiates a search through our web portal, the results have to be
instantaneous. Before, it could take several seconds for an image to come up,
and if you multiply that by multiple users over a month or two, that’s a lot of
wasted time. Now with Isilon we have near-zero latency so we get sub-second
response times – a 6X improvement. That translates to higher productivity,
increased efficiency and substantial savings in time and money, which helped us
recoup our investment within 18 months.

"Our NetApp environment
was difficult to scale to meet our big data requirements. With Isilon, however,
all we do is plug in another node and the additional capacity is immediately
available. We can easily scale-up our IT environment to meet our storage needs.
It’s a very predictable investment without the pain and unknown support costs
often associated with new capital expenditures.

"Because Isilon is
plug-and-play with a single point of management through its OneFS operating
system, we’ve been able to minimize the labor associated with IT
administration, reducing our costs by at least one FTE.

"With Isilon’s excellent
performance and scalability, we’re able to step out into the SaaS market, which
opens up another growth market that we’ve never competed in before. This kind
of gear puts us in a position with enough power and agility to stand up against
any of the Goliaths in the industry. So heading into the future, the sky’s the
limit for Paragon when it comes to attracting new clients and handling a surge
in business demand."