E-discovery rules add summer IT work for schools

Computerworld - School districts nationwide face an especially difficult IT assignment this summer: to create systems that ensure compliance with new federal electronic discovery regulations.

September 2005 updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require that electronic documents -- including e-mail and perhaps even instant messaging logs -- be available as evidence in civil court cases. Observers note that widespread enforcement of the rules will likely begin by the end of 2007, a year later than expected (see "New e-discovery rules go into effect in December ").

Jay Attiya, K-12 network manager for the Middletown Township School District in Monmouth County, N.J., said that archiving all electronic data could prove especially difficult for small IT organizations in regional or local school districts.

“By and large, in the past, [FRCP] rules really didn’t pertain to [K-12 school districts like] they did to the Enron’s of the world,” Attiya said. “But now we are being pointed in that direction, so we have to take steps to be prepared. You have to be able to show [a federal court] that you can produce everything.” 

On the advice of the school district’s attorney, Middletown school administrators earlier this year ordered that all bidirectional e-mail communication be stored, retrievable and archived for at least three years, Attiya said.

This summer’s e-discovery project will include installing VMware, EMC Corp.’s virtualization software, on 12 of the district’s 70 Windows 2000- and 2003-based servers, he said.

The VMware software will boost the virtualization capabilities of the district’s EMC Clariion disk-based AX-100 and CX-10 storage systems. The project calls for adding Fibre Channel drives to one tray in a CX-10 box, which will be used for virtualized images, and Serial ATA arrays in the other tray to support new e-mail archiving procedures. 

The district also plans to install CommVault Systems Inc.’s Data Archiver and Data Migrator modules during the summer, Attiya said. The modules will run alongside the CommVault Galaxy backup and recovery software now used by the district, he added.

The archiving effort will require between 500GB and 1TB of new storage capacity, which will be taken care of with one new CX-10 array and the virtualization capabilities, Attiya said.

So far, experts say, few organizations of any size are prepared for the new rules. For example, 83% of 336 senior technology executives surveyed at the EMC World user conference last month by storage software vendor DiscoveryBox and consultant Strategic Discovery Inc. said that they aren’t yet meeting the requirements.

A lack of preparation could prove dire for K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency, funding and legal expertise, said Robert Ayers, technology coordinator for the Kingston, Pa.-based Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 school district.