Measuring eDiscovery Software Performance

By Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) Aug 20, 2010

Companies face many challenges when it comes to choosing the eDiscovery platform that is right for them. Price, productivity and accuracy are all factors in their decision. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to effectively compare platforms and solutions against each other?

Establishing a Benchmark for eDiscovery

Thanks to Digital Reef’s new Open eDiscovery Software Performance Benchmark (SPB), customers can now measure the speed and scalability of different eDiscovery solutions. Digital Reef partnered with Blue Arc Corporation to create this breakthrough benchmarking process and will be demonstrating it at next week’s ILTA conference. (They've also published a white paper about it.)

Through a series of standard tests designed to measure specific attributes of eDiscovery technologies and their overall performance across the EDRM, customers can implement the benchmarking process in in two phases.

Phase one, (SPB I) covers areas of information management, identification, and processing, while phase two (SPB II) is slated to test the effectiveness of the analysis and production parts of the EDRM.

Using three different data profiles, phase one works to characterize eDiscovery different types of case matter so as to recreate typical enterprise conditions and replicate common infrastructure configurations, consisting of 1 GB ethernet networks, standard Linux middleware and operating systems, BlueArc network storage systems and Dell, 2.6-3Ghz, 16GB servers.

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Figure 1 & 2: Testing & Results: Software Performance Benchmark uses three data profiles to measure eDiscovery solutions.

Of course, creating a benchmark wasn’t an entirely altruistic effort on behalf of Digital Reef – results indicate that Digital Reef can consistently handle the largest of processing demands.

However, the fact that customers have a mechanism from which to evaluate eDiscovery solutions is no small feat. Regardless of whether Digital Reef comes out on top, companies within the enterprise can start to feel as if there is baseline upon which to establish effectiveness and efficiency.