Download a PDF version of BlueArc's Ibis Consulting Case Study
Ibis Consulting relies on BlueArc’s Titan storage system at the core of their electronic discovery services business, to deliver immediate access to electronic content required for corporate litigation, enabling corporate expansion and additional revenue streams, made possible through high performance data access and massive scalability through the hundreds of terabytes.
An innovator in electronic discovery since 1992, Ibis Consulting is the leading provider of data collection and conversion services in support of business, legal and regulatory requirements. Ibis transforms electronic documents and e-mail into images and other file formats that are loadable into document management systems for expedited discovery.
In the past decade, an entire business market called Electronic Discovery Services (EDS) has emerged to support companies through litigation, by managing unstructured electronic data. Highly regulated industries, such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and health care are particularly in need of this service.
Ibis Consulting analyzes and stores customer's data, then uses its proprietary technology to perform keyword searches against those documents to further ascertain their content.
"Utilizing silicon was important, achieving line access to disk, maximizing the throughput of our business."
"93% of business communication is in electronic form, and much of it is unstructured."
"The ability to customize volumes and shares that match our business process, rather than the physical system, was important."
"The more efficient the storage management, the more efficient my business is. BlueArc has reduced our storage administration training costs."
-- Cliff Dutton,The computer age has changed corporate litigation. E-mail, instant messages, and other structured and unstructured data, can all be considered evidence in lawsuits today. Due to the rise in corporate litigation and new government compliance regulations, electronic data retention requirements have become more stringent. Therefore, the amount of electronic information a company must manage and store increases each day. When a company is subpoenaed to deliver electronic content, multiple documents and massive files must be sorted and organized. The most relevant information must then be culled out, according to the particular terms of the lawsuit.
Since each electronic discovery project varies greatly, Ibis Consulting, Inc. has few static storage requirements on a day-to-day basis. However, in some cases, a client project may consume up to half of its storage capacity at a time. Ibis Consulting, Inc. turned to BlueArc to help meet its fluctuating storage needs and to keep up with the company’s rapid overall business growth.
Ibis Consulting, Inc. uses BlueArc’s Titan SiliconServer, with more than 100 terabytes of low-cost ATA drives, to offer a highly scalable storage system with the required performance capability needed for detailed searching, indexing and retrieval of sensitive data.
The ability for Titan to support block sizes as small as 4K apiece helps to pack more files into the same capacity, and the administrative instrumentation of free disk array provides comfort and confidence that Ibis Consulting, Inc. can respond to any client conditions.
For Ibis, there have been three major benefits from relying on BlueArc as a key element of their demanding business infrastructure, including the system speed, ease of administration, and tremendous scalability. These advantages combine to give the company a single reliable storage solution with capacity to grow and meet future business needs – without headaches traditionally associated with intense technology environments.
The first major benefit from using Titan is the speed at which files can now be accessed and sorted. The bandwidth of traditional telecommunication lines can be throttles on performance. With BlueArc, the company now benefits from line-speed access to disk. This vastly improves the company’s ability to meet the needs of the electronic discovery market.
A close second is the ease of administration, as well as the monitoring and reporting features. Since BlueArc’s products are so easy to manage, Ibis Consulting, Inc. storage administration training costs are nominal. The more efficient the storage management, the more efficient business can be.
The third critical benefit has been scalability. In the Electronic Discovery Services business, adding incremental revenue streams is directly tied to the ability to add incremental storage.
While sales forecasts can project the company’s future incremental storage needs to some extent, this is merely an estimate. If the company takes on a large new project not part of sales projections, it needs to be able to scale capacity rapidly. Prior to using BlueArc, multiple terabyte storage expansion could take months, while expansion now takes mere days.
As a result, the requirements of large projects are addressed faster and more efficiently than that of the company’s competition because of this truly scalable storage architecture.
In the field of Electronic Discovery Services, the requirement to deliver data immediately can be a legal matter. For Ibis Consulting, their ability to exceed expectations and grow their business through the utilization of next generation storage systems from BlueArc enables them to take on more clients and their data – while retaining leading performance and instantaneous seek times.
Each individual case is unique, and data requirements can vary widely, through the hundreds of terabytes. Without a crystal ball to outline each customer’s expectations, Ibis is empowered knowing that their storage infrastructure can meet future needs, and has the ability to grow rapidly if needed.