Paragon Legal Technology Support Manages Big Data Growth with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass. - December 11, 2012 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Paragon Legal Technology Support, which provides law firms and corporations with advanced litigation support services, replaced its NetApp storage environment with EMC® Isilon® scale-out storage to manage its Big Data requirements. EMC Isilon has enabled Paragon to accelerate the collection of forensic evidence and streamline the company’s e-discovery projects. It has also provided Paragon the scalability it needed to rapidly grow its expanding cloud-based business.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Performance — Isilon enabled sub-second response times for retrieving key relevant documents from millions of pages, a 6X improvement from its previous NetApp storage solution, driving millions of dollars in new revenue.
• Rapid ROI — Higher productivity, increased efficiency and substantial cost savings allowed Paragon to achieve a return on its investment in Isilon in just 18 months.
• Simplified Administration — With Isilon’s single point of management, Paragon reduced IT administration by lowering costs by at least one FTE.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Paragon’s staff must pore through as many as 30 million pages of documentation, emails and other data to support its clients in litigation. All collected forensic evidence is stored in an unalterable digital image format, creating case files as large as 9 terabytes or more. The firm’s previous NetApp storage lacked the performance and scalability to support these Big Data requirements. During one of the firm’s most important cases, the NetApp storage ran out of capacity, stalling the discovery process and threatening to compromise the client relationship.

To quickly resolve this roadblock and support uninhibited Big Data growth for the long term, Paragon replaced its NetApp storage with EMC Isilon S-Series and X-Series systems. The S-Series is configured with Flash drives to provide super-fast performance for Paragon’s Microsoft SQL Server database. The X-Series stores tagged image file format (TIFF) and all other electronic content used in the discovery process. The Isilon solution supports Paragon’s IPRO e-discovery tool, Mindseye TunnelVision search and assessment tool and iCONECT XERA database management tool for hosted client services.

With Isilon, Paragon has dramatically improved performance of content searches, while enabling virtually unlimited scalability to take on cases rivaling the biggest players in the industry. Moreover, the performance and scalability of Isilon has opened the door for Paragon to expand its hosted services with software-as-a-service (SaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), offering growth opportunities never before possible.

Customer Quotes:

Paul Cowley, CEO and Co-Founder, Paragon Legal Technology Support

“Our clients often require us to filter through massive volumes of Big Data that might span 5,000 documents and millions of pages just to find one or two documents of evidence that determine the success of a case. Isilon’s speed and reliability enable us to respond to practically any request, which provides a competitive advantage that has helped drive millions of dollars in new revenue.”

“When an attorney initiates a search through our web portal, the results have to be instantaneous. Before, it could take several seconds for an image to come up, and if you multiply that by multiple users over a month or two, that’s a lot of wasted time. Now with Isilon we have near-zero latency so we get sub-second response times — a 6X improvement. That translates to higher productivity, increased efficiency and substantial savings in time and money, which helped us recoup our investment within 18 months.”

“Our NetApp environment was difficult to scale to meet our Big Data requirements. With Isilon, however, all we do is plug in another node and the additional capacity is immediately available. We can easily scale-up our IT environment to meet our storage needs. It’s a very predictable investment without the pain and unknown support costs often associated with new capital expenditures.”

“Because Isilon is plug-and-play with a single point of management through its OneFS® operating system, we’ve been able to minimize the labor associated with IT administration, reducing our costs by at least one FTE.”

“With Isilon’s excellent performance and scalability, we’re able to step out into the SaaS market, which opens up another growth market that we’ve never competed in before. This kind of gear puts us in a position with enough power and agility to stand up against any of the Goliaths in the industry. So heading into the future, the sky’s the limit for Paragon when it comes to attracting new clients and handling a surge in business demand.”

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC Isilon
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