How To Do It For Little-To-No Additional Cost<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As an eDiscovery consultant, I\u2019ve managed and optimized hundreds of client environments. I\u2019ve been fortunate to work with some truly talented technologists. After all these engagements, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned. The pressure to perform in this industry is incredibly high<\/strong>. I see organizations struggling with two core questions. First, how do we do more with less, given that budgets and resources are limited? Second, how do we handle a large new project that could overwhelm our existing capacities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both questions are about eDiscovery performance. Here\u2019s the good news, as I see it; in virtually every environment I\u2019ve assessed, there have been opportunities to dramatically increase performance for nominal additional costs<\/strong>. In this article I\u2019d like to share five ideas with you that could really help you do more with less. In fact, it\u2019s entirely possible that these ideas could double the performance of your eDiscovery environment for zero additional dollars<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who Is This Counsel For?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Law firms, eDiscovery service providers, major accounting and consulting firms, government regulators and even corporations often own and manage eDiscovery environments in-house. While there are substantial differences in their service offerings and business models, all of these types of organizations want speed, throughput and reliability from their environments<\/strong>. If what I\u2019m about to describe sounds like your organization, these ideas could be exactly what you\u2019re looking for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we look at my five ideas, let me quickly describe what the word performance means to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that sounds like your organization and what you\u2019d like to achieve, I believe these five ideas could really help: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s take a closer look at each of these ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Get Clarity About Your Environment\u2019s Current State Capabilities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The starting point for doubling performance is documenting current state. This is a relatively straightforward exercise, yet one I see most organizations not engaging in. Why do you need to do this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I recommend that you document performance in two areas: systems and throughput (the actual amount of work you\u2019re getting complete). For systems, I recommend this type of analysis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n To document throughput, I recommend these types of analyses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This first step is essential to establish an accurate picture of your environment\u2019s current state. This analysis will be helpful in targeting areas to address to improve performance. It will also help you take full advantage of the other points of counsel in this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Provision Virtual Machine Resources Based Upon Workload Requirements<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to double the performance of your current eDiscovery environment for little to no cost, I recommend that you pay close attention to your virtual machines (VMs). These are software-based servers that emulate the performance of an actual physical server. Why do I recommend this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a client tells me that their environment is experiencing sluggish performance and suboptimal speeds, I first examine the utilization rate and resource footprint of their VMs. The findings rarely surprise me. In my experience, 90% of eDiscovery virtual machines are configured using a standard IT practice called \u201cover-committing the host.\u201d This is the number one culprit for poor performance at the virtualization layer of the platform<\/strong>. In many VM configurations, over-commitment is the default setting out of the box. This is problematic for two very important reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re cannibalizing your resources, you essentially have two options today: scale out or scale up. In the scale up approach, you secure additional resources for your underlying hosts. This is about deploying fewer, yet more powerful, machines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the scale out approach, our recommended approach, you deploy more physical machines with fewer resources per machine. This allows each machine to handle a finite work-load. We find that this produces overall better performance because no one physical machine is being over-tasked. This allows for more effective load balancing across the eDiscovery environment. Clients who\u2019ve done this have experienced up to a 100% uptick in compute efficiency<\/strong>. Moreover, the heightened performance is immediate and lasting. So how does this work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n VMs consume the resources of an actual physical server, particularly CPUs and RAM, based on their allocation. But not all VM functions require the same allocation and so do not need to be consuming resources at the same level. For example, if you have a VM involved in Processing, it will require substantially higher allocation of the physical server\u2019s resources than say, a typical agent server (please note that some agents or processes require just as many or more resources as Processing). But if other VMs on that same physical machine are configured to consume the same number of resources as the VM that is Processing, it just might under-perform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem with the default settings in VMs is that they then consume resources as if they were involved in heavy-compute tasks<\/strong>\u2014even if they are not<\/strong>. If you have 10 VMs on one physical server and all 10 VMs are configured as if they are doing heavy work, they will try to pull more compute power than the physical server has available. That will produce sluggish overall performance, and unpredictable behavior as random VMs win the battle for resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Understand Agent Activity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to substantially increase performance without buying a bunch of new technology, I recommend that you closely analyze your use of agents<\/strong>. These are features or functions that sit in the middleware of most eDiscovery applications. Agents deliver a lot of benefits and can handle thousands of different tasks within a work-flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our experience, two agents in particular can really degrade performance if they are not properly configured: Search and Conversion (near-native rendering). They\u2019re powerful, but they also can consume a lot of precious and limited resources. When they are on the same Virtual Machine and launch at the same time, the results can be disastrous<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My recommendation is that you DO NOT pair any of these agents on the same VM. In fact, I recommend that you balance all of the agents for your primary eDiscovery application across numerous VMs to ensure the most efficient operation. There are two reasons I say this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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