Not sure what is is with me and e-discovery this week, but I had to mention this as soon as I heard about it. This entry in the Electronic Discovery Blog reports the following:
eMag Solutions recently announced the development of a new process able to directly access and restore mainframe virtual tape libraries without recreating the mainframe environment.
Maybe it’s just me (that’s an ironic rhetorical statement implying the opposite) but there are plenty of forensic tools to snag potentially discoverable material from Windows, Linux and Mac systems. Even portable devices like iPhones and PDAs. I think we have to low end covered pretty well. But this is the first I’ve heard of getting that same kind of ability with mainframes – particularly VTLs. But why should we care? Who uses mainframes anymore (more ironic rhetorical stuff)? Only pretty much everybody in the financial sector, certainly all of the big guys, rely on mainframes for their serious data processing. Even if they use Outlook or Notes for their end user communication, it’s likely that much of the data will reside in a VTL somewhere. In any case, I just really like the idea of being able to do forensics on a VTL without having to pony up for a Z990 and a VSM.
A visit to eMag’s site provided more interesting, if not a bit breathlessly marketeering, information.
eMag Solutions, LLC, an international provider of electronic discovery services and data management solutions, announced today the development of a technological breakthrough in accessing and restoring discoverable data directly from “virtual tape” created from a mainframe environment. The result of this achievement will be the substantial savings of time and money for organizations needing to restore archive tapes in volume from a mainframe environment. The innovative technology experts at eMag Solutions have developed the ability to read and restore discoverable data directly from virtual tape without having to recreate any part of the original mainframe environment. Moreover, the breakthrough includes the ability to restore virtual tape without over-taxing the data center’s production capacity.
The significance of eMag’s achievement cannot be overstated. Companies have spent millions of dollars to rebuild mainframe environments in an effort to access and restore data that does not exist on a physical tape in a logical format. While virtual tapes contain the same data as physical tapes, they cannot be accessed in the same way, requiring tremendous time and costly processing capacity to recover data needed for litigation, regulatory or compliance matters — until now.
Data management expert Adam Joffe of Datacove Information Services, Inc. described the traditional challenge of accessing data on virtual tape as, “Similar to searching for a single dollar bill in a bank vault full of money. eMag’s advancement provides the ability to quickly and inexpensively access this data.” eMag Solutions is able to support mainframe environments operating Sun/Storagetek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) as well as IBM’s Virtual Tape Server (VTS).
Maybe it’s just me (again with the rhetorical irony) but this is wicked cool. Although it does kind of hose up the chances of convicing the boss to get that Z990.
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