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ZL Technologies: A Unified Approach To Active Archiving: Page 4 of 5

For example, Unified Archive scales to handle billions of documents. So what, you say? After all, many storage arrays can now store petabytes of data. But volume is not the issue that breaks down a large archive. The problem, in addition to the daily ingestion rate, is how long it takes to index and, more importantly, to search all those documents. ZL Technologies claims a major differentiator through its use of massively parallel processing (MPP) technologies, which it claims reduce search times by three orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000 times) over that of non-MPP searches.

That makes it possible for companies to effectively manage and maintain one unified archive. Otherwise, the data for a particular eDiscovery litigation event (which would hopefully be much less than the total archive) would have to be copied separately. That is not as easy as it sounds and results in two copies of the data,  since the original data has to be left in the archive. That also means, by definition, that there is no unified management mechanism. One archive means less space, one uniform set of policies. That avoids confusion and conflicts, and means there can be no conflicting displays or reports that purport to show two different versions of what the enterprise perceives to be the truth.

There are a number of benefits in a Unified Archive-managed environment. From an internal IT perspective, storage administrators should be happy. Active production systems have a new, slimmer look, which increases the performance of processes such as weekly back-ups. On the archive side, Unified Archive's support of deduplication and single instancing means that redundant data, such as many copies of the same e-mail attachment, need not be stored, leading to overall savings.

The end user also benefits. Individuals can find and use information without the need for the intervention of a systems administrator. But it is the larger business that derives the biggest benefits. An information governance process can be put in place that truly manages data retention. Data that should be purged can be, but data that needs to be retained will not be lost and create legal exposures.Compliance is another area that the Unified Archive can help address for both government agencies and corporate organizations.

However, the biggest enchilada is records management, which deals with the critical issue of data retention management. eDiscovery is another key area of concentration. Unified Archive provides a number of rich features and functions in addition to classification and search, such as legal hold capabilities, strong analytics, and conceptual searching, that are crucial to effectively managing eDiscovery processes.