Precision Discovery success story

 A big reason we’ve stayed with Hitachi all these years is its
people: The willingness and expertise from Hitachi engineers,
sales, field and support keep us coming back. They have
earned our complete trust and loyalty.
SUCCESS STORY
Howard Holton
Director of IT
Precision Discovery
INNOVATION
Precision Discovery Catapults Service Quality for Legal Clients
With the Right Mix of Hitachi Technology and Support
A forward-thinking company chose the right technology
partner before opening its e-discovery doors for business.
Years later, Precision Discovery manages over 2PB of storage
and hundreds of physical and virtual machines. With an IT
staff of 3 and a 40-hour workweek, the company achieves
perpetually low total cost of ownership (TCO) and industryleading innovations. Hitachi Data Systems provides the
stellar reliability, technologies and people required to swiftly
adapt to customer demands and manage a nearly 100%
virtualized environment.
What is black and white and read all
over? That witticism has enjoyed many
answers over time. Today, it could
easily be a one-liner for describing the
flourishing business of e-discovery.
The legal industry in the digital age has
created a demand for examining and
analyzing pretrial evidence electronically:
a process known as e-discovery. In
order to prepare for and successfully
present cases, attorneys rely on external firms that specialize in ingesting,
managing, storing and protecting
e-discovery data. The success of an
e-discovery firm often depends on staff
expertise and proprietary processes to
provide clients with rapid and meaningful
access to case data and metadata.
By these measures and more, Precision
Discovery is one of the most successful
e-discovery firms in the litigation support
industry. From computer forensics and
litigation preparedness to technologyassisted review and project management, Precision Discovery provides a
full suite of e-discovery products and
services. Clients are able to fully leverage
the firm’s talent and technology to expedite litigation pretrial work and ultimately
save time and expense.
Precision Discovery was founded in
2008 by a team of richly experienced
professionals passionately focused on
integrity, respect and transparency. At
Precision Discovery, the mission is grand
Precision Discovery
INDUSTRY
E-discovery
SOLUTION
Modular Storage, File and Content,
Virtualization, Storage Management
HardWARE
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2500,
Hitachi NAS Platform 3090 and 3080,
Hitachi Unified Storage 150, Hitachi
Compute Blades 2000, 500 and 320
SOFTWARE
Hitachi Command Suite, including Hitachi
Device Manager, Hitachi Tuning Manager,
Hitachi Command Director
SERVICES
Provided by Hitachi Data Systems Global
Solution Services and Hitachi Data Systems
Credit Corporation; HiCard (prepaid training
program)
SUCCESS STORY
The reliability of Hitachi products and the simplicity of the user
interface have helped us to literally hit the ground running as a
company and to keep our TCO very, very low. Howard Holton
Director of IT
Precision Discovery
but simple: Provide the highest caliber of
service and responsiveness while offering
innovative technology and expert consultancy to increase efficiencies. Operating as
a highly unified team, employees are committed to creating relationship continuity
and knowledge stability for the company’s ever-growing client base. Precision
Discovery is uniquely 100% employee
owned and the employee retention rate is
exceptionally high.
The backbone of the company might well
be its people, but the IT infrastructure
is pretty impressive, too. State-of-theart hardware and intelligent custom and
core software artfully combine to create
Precision Discovery’s proprietary methodologies and best practices. Precision
Discovery uses a proven blend of over
100 custom software tools to alleviate the
typical challenges of e-discovery. Precision
Discovery provides clients with real-time
dashboards for managing every stage of
litigation, automated redaction to accelerate
reviews, and even a tool to view sensitive
information hidden in native files.
“We have a ton of competition in this industry.
What sets Precision Discovery apart from
other firms in this space is our people and our
process. Our people are our greatest asset,
no doubt, and our e-discovery method is our
most important secret. Before we ever opened
our doors for business, we knew we needed
the right storage infrastructure in place to help
us do what we do,” says Howard Holton, the
director of IT for Precision Discovery.
Founders Discover the Right
Storage Partner
Holton was at Precision Discovery from the
beginning, initially as a consultant and now
as the main person responsible for their IT
department. “The founders put out a call
to arms to every storage vendor for demos
and proposals on beta sets, to seek and
find the right storage solution,” he explains.
“The winner was BlueArc, and they won
by a margin so large that no other vendor
was even playing on the same field. We
started with a Titan NAS system. Its ability
to handle small files with dexterity was why
BlueArc was chosen as the primary storage
vendor. We still needed storage arrays to
go behind the Titan, which is how we came
to Hitachi Data Systems.”
And the rest is success in the making. With
the acquisition of BlueArc into the Hitachi
family of products and services, Precision
Discovery has become a mostly Hitachi
shop. “It was absolutely fortuitous that we
initially found BlueArc. A big reason we’ve
stayed with Hitachi all these years is its
people: The willingness and expertise from
Hitachi engineers, sales, field and support
keep us coming back. They have earned
our complete trust and loyalty. And the reliability of Hitachi products and the simplicity
of the user interface have helped us to literally hit the ground running as a company
and to keep our TCO very, very low,”
he furthers.
A Mostly Hitachi Shop
From that first BlueArc Titan and a pair of
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 1000
systems, Precision Discovery has grown
to managing 2PB of storage. Presently,
the company has a primary data center
and a disaster recovery site. At the data
center, a Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)
manages 1PB and provides online archive
data protection and tiering, with replication
to a second, smaller HCP at the disaster
recovery site.
Hitachi Content Platform provides a backup-free, immutable storage format that
does not require constant backup cycles.
By archiving first with HCP, Precision
Discovery is able to reclaim storage elsewhere in the environment, and reduce
operational expenses. Loaded with intelligent archival features, HCP helps IT
adeptly handle data reduction, including
deduplication and compression.
“The deduplication technology is the key to
why we went with the HCP. A large majority
of our data is fairly stagnant once it’s read.
With e-discovery, when case data comes in,
it can automatically contain duplicates, just
by virtue of the process. For example, case
data might include hundreds of emails, from
multiple email addresses. If one attachment
was sent to several email recipients, the
e-discovery process will break out and save
to disk those emails and attachments. So
dedupe is a big appeal for us. HCP allows us
to control data size and eliminate unnecessary copies for any given piece of content,”
Holton details.
3
The technology refresh also includes a
2-node Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS)
3090 Ultra Cluster with 500TB in front of
an Adaptable Modular Storage 2500 at
the data center. The disaster recovery site
has a single-node HNAS 3080 running in
front of another AMS 2500. All of the disks
attached to HNAS are SAS. HNAS makes
it easy for Precision to replicate between
sites using open protocols such as NDMP
to control data backup and recovery
communications.
HNAS provides significant performance,
capacity and cost improvements over traditional file servers and other NAS offerings
for cohesive consolidation strategies. With
single namespace capabilities and few
points of management, HNAS generates
greater results with less effort to support
the entire file environment. Its capacity efficiency technologies, such as virtualization
and thin provisioning, allow for capacity
reclamation, better utilization rates, and a
faster return on assets.
The solution is laid across a Brocade 10
gigabit Ethernet network and capitalizes
on Hitachi Command Suite software to
simplify and automate important data
center chores. “We’re managing 2PB of
1
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disk and 8 arrays, and hundreds of physical
and virtual machines. The entire IT staff is
made of 3 people, me included. Normally,
at most companies, IT puts in the long,
long hours, just trying to keep up with the
environment. Here, we aren’t the last ones
to go home, and my staff keeps close to
40-hour workweeks. The Hitachi software
bundle installed on these products is very
helpful at helping us keep things simple
and efficient. And we just love the HiCard
Program1: It’s an all-you-can-eat training
buffet,” Holton remarks.
The Case for TCO and Peace
of Mind
Hitachi Compute Blade (CB) servers join
the storage environment at Precision
Discovery, replacing an aging HP blade
infrastructure. Holton brought in a Hitachi
Unified Storage 150 fully loaded with
www.hds.com/innovate
CB 2000 blades. Hitachi Compute Blades
go beyond traditional blade technology
with high-end features, including flexible
I/O and LPAR virtualization for customizing
configurations and dynamically adapting to
workload demands.
To underscore Hitachi reliability and unparalleled service, Holton says, “Right now,
as we speak, the new gear and blades
are being installed. I have such utter confidence in Hitachi that I’m not even at the
data center.”
He describes how IT is readying the storage
environment for the next big thing. “We
are preparing to do a huge migration to
[Microsoft®] Hyper-V® and another migration from our current XenApp to XenApp
6.5, which will increase our density and
lower overhead and costs. We will use
Visit http://www.hds.com/services/education/north-america/hicard-program.html for information regarding HiCard prepaid training program.
Microsoft System Center 2012 to manage
it, and it’ll sit on the Hitachi gear. We plan
to use the HNAS for the Hyper-V implementation, and again the Hitachi software
bundle will be very useful here.”
The goal is to virtualize most of the IT
environment at Precision Discovery for
greater ease of management and cost
efficiency. “Right now, we have about 400
virtual machines, which comprise 75%
of our environment. With the Hyper-V
implementation and the other improvements we’ve made, I anticipate nearly
100%, right between 95% and 98%,” he
continues.
Also along the lines of achieving better
cost efficiencies, Precision Discovery
operates under a leasing model rather
than purchasing capital equipment,
to allocate funds for maximum return
on investments. Hitachi Data Systems
Credit Corporation (HDSCC) works with
Corporate Headquarters
2845 Lafayette Street
Santa Clara, CA 96050-2639 USA
www.HDS.com
a customer’s unique requirements to
structure a complete business solution
with flexible terms and lowest possible
lease rates on both Hitachi and 3rd-party
products. “The leasing program has been
a fantastic experience, absolutely a smart
move. Leasing rather than purchasing
helps us predict our spend, forecast
more accurately; and we build the Hitachi
support right into the initial lease terms,”
Holton mentions.
“Technology can be a matter of luck, money or
commodity. But the right technology and support helps us get where we want to go, quickly
and wisely. Because of what we’ve accomplished, what we continue to accomplish, with
partners like Hitachi, we are poised to always
evolve as a company and a team, and to bring
a plethora of new offerings to market very
soon,” Holton concludes.
The total cost of ownership is a huge
driver of business value for many organizations. At Precision Discovery, being
able to orchestrate enterprise functionality
without the enterprise price tag allows the
company to remain agile and innovative.
The IT department has realized an excellent price-to-performance ratio, which
Holton tracks on a dollar per compute
hour basis.
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© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2013. All rights reserved. HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. Innovate With Information and HiCard are trademarks
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Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered by
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.
SS-453-A DG June 2013