This week marks the first anniversary of changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which mandates the speedy recovery of electronically stored information. In the intervening year, oodles of vendors have tweaked their archiving products to meet the requirements of the FRCP, adding search and rapid retrieval capability, as well as the ability to audit operations.

In the next year, Mary Mack, technology counsel for FIOS, expects that e-discovery will be bolstered by two events: the subprime mortgage crisis and the Qualcomm vs. Broadcom suit. She talks about the impact of these events here.

Index Engines also recently introduced the capability of its appliance to index data from offline tape to speed the e-discovery process. 

According to Marie Charlotte Patterson, vice president of corporate marketing and market strategy for AXS-One, a compliance management company, its customers had disparate approaches to e-discovery. “When we met with our customer advisory board in February of this year, it was clear that there was no unified approach [to e-discovery] and no clear understanding of what the rules meant," says Patterson. “Companies were at disparate phases - there were those who really had their arms around what the new requirements were going to be to those who had just started out."
 
Nearly a year later, Patterson surveyed AXS-One customers.

“In October this year, we are starting to see companies having their arms around e-mail archiving and what it means, but be able to manage and retrieve data from backup tapes. All the customers on our advisory board agreed that they need to get rid of backup tapes."

A number of company’s are already in the business of getting information off backup tapes for customers. Among them are RenewData, Index Engines and Intradyn. 

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