Index Engines extends e-discovery appliance to Data Domain

Computerworld - Index Engines announced today that its data collection software has been integrated with EMC's Data Domain's de-duplication technology.

The API integration allows Index Engines' appliance to run policies that automatically identify and extract files and email from the Data Domain backup appliance for regulatory and legal discovery purposes.

Jim McGann, vice president of Information Discovery for Index Engines, said that not only does his company's technology help sort data for e-discovery purposes, but it can also be used to reduce archive requirements.

"Right now companies are backing up for disaster recovery and then ... taking those images and putting it on tape for the long term. You don't need all that data. Only about 5% of it is really relevant data," he said. "You can filter out the relevant data in the backup."

Index Engine's technology had already worked with backup products from Symantec, CA and CommVault.

The Collection Engine appliance sits in the Data Domain backup box and automatically indexes backup images, identifying the useful content, collecting what is relevant and writing it back to allocated disk space on the Data Domain storage, making it available for compliance and litigation purposes.

The Index Engine also indexes the content of backup images so that they can be searched and analyzed for business relevance. The searches can be high-level metadata such as user mailboxes, or detailed queries based on file or email content, location and date ranges. Searches are saved as stored queries that run automatically once a new backup is executed.

The Collection Engine for Data Domain will be available July 1 and is priced on a per user account-basis. For 1,000 users, the price is $50 per account or $50,000 with annual maintenance of 20%. The purchase of an Index Engines hardware platform is also required.

Index Engines provides support for accounts in Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes, and file system data within a single platform with full discovery and archiving capabilities.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at  @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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