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Document Technologies Inc (DTI), a rapidly-growing company focused on the electronic discovery business, accelerated their data analysis workflow by ten times over their previous solution by deploying high performance network storage from BlueArc. The capabilities of Titan enable DTI to work at full capacity even through peak demands - generating in excess of 2 million files per day to facilitate rapid response to legal requests.
DTI is America's fastest-growing document outsourcing company, providing end-to-end solutions for the legal and corporate markets. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with 26 branch offices throughout the country, DTI has more than 1,500 employees focused on world-class consulting, project management, training and production capabilities, creating a compelling value proposition for clients' most demanding needs. The company handles all facets of legal documentation - from photocopying to imaging and electronic discovery.
"The growth and robustness of our electronic document discovery business demands the highest throughput and capacity available. As such, we're excited about the unmatched performance that is possible with BlueArc's Titan 2200."
"Now we move ten times as many files per second as before. We brought NetApp in house, and it was about one-quarter the speed."
"BlueArc's competition did not measure up as the Titan 2200 will provide a NAS solution that is 10 times faster than anything we've used before."
-- Kevin Jacobs,As DTI worked to accommodate dramatic increases in case load and new clients, it rapidly became apparent that they needed to scale their technology infrastructure in terms of capacity and performance to meet unforgiving legal deadlines - often enforced through a judge's subpoena. Yet the company's existing storage would be bogged down during peak loads - forcing the company's IT staff to slow down or stop other parallel processes, including backups. When overloaded, the systems would force a backlog of data to be processed, as no new images could be loaded for analysis, bringing business to a standstill. A solution was needed that could handle highest levels of I/O and capacity to store the dozens of terabytes that could be created from individual cases.
Following a thorough investigation into a variety of network storage solutions from leading and smaller vendors, DTI deployed an active-active Titan 2200 storage system with more than forty terabytes of high performance Fibre Channel storage. Titan was selected due to the system's high capacity and performance that outstripped competitive offerings from four to ten times in both operations per second and throughput metrics. Featuring a hardware file system, Titan offered DTI the ability to ramp up demand without being bogged down by I/O, enabling the company to tap the full capacity of the existing environment without storage limitations.
In the electronic discovery market, gigabytes of customer data received for analysis can rapidly balloon to several hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes, as large repositories, including e-mail archives, have to be extracted into individual files, including attachments, converted to TIFF images, and retain metadata that accurately defines the file. For DTI, each image has an associated text file, and for every gigabyte processed, 70,000 images are generated. The images are then analyzed, using proprietary search algorithms, in an attempt to accurately identify data in question.
For DTI, this process put an incredible strain on their disparate network storage structure, which brought all other activity to a halt, and as the company's vice president of technology, Kevin Jacobs, states, it wasn't a question of having enough storage capacity, but instead, one of performance, to manage and process the workflow. In the company's evaluation of a variety of NAS solutions from leaders in the market, it soon became clear that standard architectures designed around bottlenecked central processors would not be able to meet demand. In contrast, BlueArc offered a unique approach for DTI, including a hardware-based file system architected for performance.
"The speeding of every element in our storage environment was critical," Jacobs said. "Our most substantial bottleneck to I/O was the storage device. We looked at 3Par and OnStor, and tried the NetApp in house. It was a quarter of the speed of what we saw on the BlueArc."
Recognizing the significant impact storage offered to the fastest-growing aspect of the company's business, DTI deployed Titan in production and pointed all client work at the system, eliminating slowdowns, and enabling significantly higher load to take place concurrently, with aggregate speed reaching ten times the previous NAS environment, and far beyond competitive offerings. The speed boost now enables DTI to respond to client inquiries much more quickly without fear the infrastructure will let the company down. A reactive business, DTI will often get calls from high-priced attorneys who need data immediately for court cases, and cannot let technology impact the legal process - regardless of its cause.
"As the volume has gone up in this business, you learn what pieces of the process are taking the most time, and you do whatever you can to reduce that time," Jacobs said. "BlueArc is ten times faster than what we were using. As we add additional machines to the cluster, rates are consistent, and Titan handles the load very well."
With the Titans installed, DTI has significantly raised the company's ability to take on new clients and new cases without delay. The company has grown more than 30 percent each year for the last few years, and the electronic discovery portion of DTI's business has even outstripped that pace - marking 50 percent growth from 2004 to 2005, and doubling from 2005 to 2006. While demands cannot be easily anticipated, BlueArc gives DTI a foundation for gracefully handling peak performance as the company continues to grow, where competitive NAS solutions simply did not measure up.
Today's fast-growing data-driven businesses cannot adequately serve customers without building the company around a stable technology infrastructure that enables them to grow without business impact. For DTI, seeing unprecedented customer demand for rapid turn-around on its expanding electronic discovery business, traditional architectures could not meet demands and threatened to stall the company's progress. By deploying a robust storage solution at the core of the company's data pipeline, DTI accelerated their business processes, protected data and clients, all while saving time and money. Through a unique approach to accelerating network storage, Titan delivered ten times the performance of the company's previous environment, and set the foundation for continued success and peace of mind.