Index Engines Automates the Backup Tape eDiscovery Process

New Tape Engines Slash Discovery Time & Costs By Eliminating Restore from the Tape Discovery Process

Storage Decisions Conference New York, NY – September 27, 2006 - Index Engines, the leader in next-generation enterprise-wide indexing solutions, today unveiled the industry’s first solution to directly index the contents of offline tape media. For the first time, companies can comply with legal discovery requests to search their entire tape archives without having to first restore the data, thereby fully automating the previously time consuming legal discovery process. Finally, the costs, time delays and erroneous reporting involved with manual searches are a thing of the past.

The new TE-200 Tape Engine turns offline backup tapes into a directly searchable repository. It can scale to index tape archives of all sizes, from small discovery operations of a few hundred tapes up to large corporate environments. The TE-200 indexes tapes at the maximum physical speeds of modern tape drives. Many tape drives can be indexed simultaneously for efficiency.

Today, organizations must be prepared to locate and produce information - emails, files, and database data - in electronic format during legal litigation according to amendments made in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that goes into effect in December 1, 2006.

Index Engines has addressed this vexing problem for businesses that are increasingly facing litigation and requests for documents as part of the discovery processes. The TE-200 functions as an automated paralegal, transforming a time consuming manual process into a fast, automated operation and eliminating the errors associated with manual discovery.

According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, 91 percent of organizations with over 20,000 employees had to produce an email as part of an electronic discovery request in the past year and one-third of these companies go through one or more requests per month. Fifty-six percent of organizations claim that retrieving information from offline media such as tape is their largest challenge when responding to electronic discovery requests. More than half the time, discovery requests are not satisfied because of these challenges leaving organizations to settle lawsuits or spend significant resources fighting cases without a full arsenal of evidence.

“Companies can no longer rely on traditional discovery methods because locating digital information across multiple IT systems is like looking for a football in the Grand Canyon. It just becomes an impossible task,” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst of ESG. “Customers need better technology solutions to facilitate the discovery of electronic information in response to a myriad of discovery requests that occur on a regular basis.”

“CIOs have been faced with two major problems in managing offline tape archives: the pain of simply not knowing what resides on those tapes, and the time and excessive costs involved when trying to catalog the archives in response to legal discovery requests,” said Tim Williams, CEO of Index Engines. “Our eDiscovery Engine addresses both of these concerns by dramatically simplifying a complex process and giving CIOs the power to produce discovery evidence much quicker, while enabling an organization to easily perform a risk assessment to determine any possible legal exposure and then proactively eliminate the exposure.”

The new Tape Engine from Index Engines eliminates the cost and complexity of indexing offline tapes by seamlessly integrating into existing tape backup infrastructures and directly indexing offline tapes. The patent pending indexing engine supports the leading backup software formats, including Tivoli Storage Manager, EMC-Legato and Veritas, and directly indexes the contents without the drudgery and complexity involved in manually restoring the tape contents and then rummaging through the files and emails to find the required documents. Instead, as the tapes are indexed the database is immediately searchable. IT managers have full flexibility in searching the index and can issue queries for full content search using Boolean operators, document metadata (title, author, date modified, date accessed, file type, size, and more), or email metadata.

When a document is located and needs to be restored, users can simply select the file in the list of search results and an email will automatically be generated to the administrator will all the relevant information required (tape ID, location on tape and file name) to restore the specific file.

The TE-200 is currently available with prices starting at $29,500 for a package that scales to support a four million file network. For more information on Index Engines enterprise indexing products contact the company at (732) 817-1060.