Part of our flagship program theCUBE, broadcasting live from EMC World this week in Las Vegas, show hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante caught up with Brian Smith, Engineer Information Technology at Epiq Systems.

Smith started by praising the event for the opportunity it provides to find out what’s out there in terms of new technology. He admited that, despite being a little bit “salesy”, it’s a great show.

Brian Smith believes that the way tech is evolving, it gravitates towards unifying the data center and the management of the data center. In his opinion, the cloud will be unifying all that scattered infrastructure.

Managing compliance + security in the cloud

Epiq Systems activates in the field of E-DISCOVERY. Basically, it deals with large amount of unstructured data. While storage is very appealing for most people, compliance is a huge issue, and storage becomes a two-edge sword.

The biggest challenge that Epiq Systems has is the relation between the security and the accessibility of the data stored. Some clients can be very paranoid when it comes to their data, fearing it might be deleted, but also fearing it might get exposed.

For the company, having multiple storage tiers to place that data, and still being able to access it online, is the largest challenge.

The trouble with scalability

Tech-wise, the challenge is scalability and facility. To remain competitive, the provider cannot rely just on throwing storage out there and constantly taking space in data centers. Epiq aims at reducing footprint and having massive scalability and stability.

In terms of growth,  Epiq’s environment is doubling every year. because the amount of data coming in is so huge, there’s really no predictability when it comes down to it. Epiq processes 2 to 4 terrabytes of data per day. The infrastructure enabling this environment is now based on Isilon. The virtualization is not complete yet, but Epiq is definitely looking into that.

The biggest selling point with Isilon for Epiq was its scalability. The clustered files systems, the availability, proved a big perk for the company. Other solutions out there have limited file systems, so it comes down to size. It is more cost effective to use a solution like Isilon, because once the limitation is reached there’s no need for a new cluster — a simple node can do the trick.

Isilon shocked techies with its simplicity. Brian Smith jokes that when they first got it, they wondered where the rest of the infrastructure was. It is super simple and it integrates great with other solutions.

Other challenges in the cloud

Other challenges that Smith acknowledged were related to the infrastructure growth an to the replication and protection of the data. Epiq is operating in many different countries across the globe, and of course that means dealing with different laws concerning data privacy.

Epiq does not use a public cloud. Due to the nature of the data that it processes, the company feels safer with a private cloud.

Smith’s advice for other IT pros out there is “Always plan ahead and always build for scalability, so you can always add on to that.”