Index Engines last week announced one of the first systems for automating the e-discovery process of data from offline tape. The company's eDiscovery Edition of its Tape Engine appliance automatically performs tape data sorting and object extraction and eliminates the restoration of tapes before e-discovery can begin.

Using an optional Extraction Module, the appliance indexes data on offline tapes without having to restore it first.

Most companies involved in the e-discovery process have volumes of data on tapes that they may never be able to restore because of proprietary or legacy tape formats. The discovery and recovery of this data from tapes can be time-consuming – amounting to $1,800 per gigabyte, according to Index Engines’ claims – and is often impossible to achieve. Once data is discovered using the Extraction Module, it is indexed and searchable and can be used to recover data needed in the e-discovery process.

The Index Engines Enterprise eDiscovery Edition understands backup formats from CA’s ARCserve, IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager, Symantec’s NetBackup and Backup Exec and EMC Legato NetWorker. The eDiscovery Edition also supports a number of tape libraries. It connects via a SCSI or Fibre Channel connection to the library.

An automated configuration utility discovers the specifications of the library and its brand of tape management software in order to automate the recovery of data. Further, the appliance generates a new catalog of tapes loaded in the library, so that it can generate an ordered sequence of recovery.

The Index Engines Enterprise eDiscovery Platform is priced at $50,000. The Extraction Module is available for $25,000.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.